Amcrest Smart Home "Server" down?

[tommcmur]

@tommcmur As with everything IOT things can go wrong from time to time there is not 1 perfect company if there was there wouldn't be the need for any others...

The Login asking for FW update was fixed.. Issue is when the Update was entered into the system it had a V in front of the # and after the update when checking version on login it seen the 2 files didn't match because the system didn't take away the V as a point of reference.. However a day or 2 before the offline issue that was resolved...

So, how long should we expect this to be down? Again, I have been down since Friday. This is now Tuesday. I am not expecting perfection, but, I do expect performance. Five days down is unbelievable. Imagine if any other company was down for 5 days. How about if you couldn't access your bank or your credit cards for 5 days. Issues will happen, but, most companies will tell you an issue exists, what the issue is, what the eta to fix is. No communication is a bad sign. Before I started my own businesses I ran technology departments at 3 colleges and universities. Even with announced upgrades, If anything were down for more than a few hours, users were asking for our heads.

Can someone who works for Amcrest please provide an update? Currently, I have three of these that are useless bricks!

[tgfarrell]

Has anyone opened a case with support? Do they have that at Amcrest?

[smcneece]

Has anyone opened a case with support? Do they have that at Amcrest?

Yes I did and after 3 days they wrote back and said to do a factory reset.

[tgfarrell]

@smcneece I assume that didn't work well then?

[Dan87]

I've reached out via social media, messenger, and a support ticket with no response to any of them. I'm growing increasingly agitated and reading through this forum, this does not look to be the first time this service has gone down for multiple days at a time without a peep or explanation from Amcrest. Really get the feeling Amcrest does not care at all about up time and accountability for that up time. Wish I could still return this and go with a company that actually cares about these things.

[hawkeye62]

Yes, I have two cases with support. The first was failure to update the firmware. Response is that R&D was working on the problem. Second was failure to re-install Smart Home. No response yet. I now have a brick. I had been getting "not connected to server" messages for several days, but everything was working perfectly. Live view worked. Event playback and General playback on the AD110 and Surveillance Pro worked. In my attempts to get Smart Home installed, I noticed that the AD110 hot spot showed up as an open network. I was tempted to log on, but I had bricked a previous AD110 by trying to change a setting without using Smart Home. I quickly disabled the hot spot so that someone wouldn't log on. I am now just sitting here with nothing working, well not exactly nothing, I can enable and disable the hot spot and do a hard reset. But without Smart Home I can't configure the AD110.

Regards, Jim

[GaryOkie]

Any way to reboot the device remotely via Config tool or browser?

@srags - The AD110 supports a subset of the standard Amcrest HTTP API - verified from my own personal testing. I tried practically all the commands that do a "Get" to retrieve information, and they worked fine. I do not dare try any API command that does a config change since that is well known to either require a factory reset to recover or worse, an RMA to replace a bricked device.

However, if you are desperate to try a remote reboot without use of the SH app, there is an API command that should do this. Since it doesn't change a config, and is actually listed as a "get" method in the docs, it should be OK to use, but certainly not guaranteed. I agree with @amcrest168 to wait if you can, but here's the command for you to decide if it's an acceptable risk in your circumstance.

Description: Reboot the device
Syntax:
http://<ip_address>/cgi-bin/magicBox.cgi?action=reboot

Method: GET

<ip_address> is the LAN IP of the device. A VPN connection to the LAN required for remote access.

[GaryOkie]

It must be a regional outage. They need an outage page or at least email an announcement out to the customers.

Well, I thought this must be a "regional outage" as well, since I am having zero issues (Android 9, latest SH app version and firmware). I just now investigated my router's connection log and discovered that the AD110 connects to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for their cloud servers. I found no evidence of it connecting to any Amcrest-hosted system.

So an "offline" outage like y'all are seeing can't realistically be a server outage on AWS, regional or otherwise. I don't know what it is that is causing this issue for so many. So Amcrest has acknowledged there is an issue I read here, but why the hell they don't have a process in place to provide timely notification to users is certainly inexcusable.

FWIW - Here are the connection details for my working AD110... (IP's will change due to AWS robust load balancing). Ports are also dynamic.

AD110 > 52.3.69.209 TCP (AWS Ashburn VA)
AD110 > 52.52.64.116 UDP (AWS San Jose CA)
AD110 > 52.52.42.29 UDP (AWS San Jose CA)

[tgfarrell]

...

Description: Reboot the device
Syntax:
http://<ip_address>/cgi-bin/magicBox.cgi?action=reboot

Method: GET

<ip_address> is the LAN IP of the device. A VPN connection to the LAN required for remote access.

@GaryOkie Where can I see the api definitions? Would be interesting to look at what they have.

[GaryOkie]

@tgfarrell - You can download the latest publicly available HTTP API guide v2.12 here. This is about 3 years old and may not be entirely up to date for the latest Amcrest camera firmware. It certainly isn't applicable to the AD110 doorbell for configuration changes.

One of the more interesting commands is to backup the config to a file. You will see all the internal settings stored in the AD110 in clear text file.

http://<ip_address>/cgi-bin/Config.backup?action=All

I can personally attest that this will do no harm to run just this "backup". It's tempting, but I would not advise tweaking this file and attempting to restore it with the new settings or even the same config. Most likely a brick would be the result.

EDIT: Earlier I mentioned that all the "Get" commands I tried "worked fine". Well, that's not correct. Trying to get a snapshot did not work - it just threw an unsupported message. Amcrest disabled this very desirable feature. Another get command that worked initially was to get stored images from the SD-Card. It was slow, but worked for the first few tries, then it borked the live video. I had to do a factory reset. These were the only "get" commands that did not work for me.