Administration

If you have ever owned and/or administered a QNAP NAS you will find the administration page of the NVR 101 surprisingly familiar. In total you have 8 subpages or administration sections to choose from. On paper this may sound scary and needlessly complicated to a first time user but trust us; QNAP are experts at making user friendly software and this goes double for their custom User Interface designs! When you start to use the Admin pages of the NVR 101, your realize that the learning curve is so short as to be almost non existent and that everything is laid out in an easy to understand manner and is super intuitive. For example, if you want to look at the logs of the NVR 101 you go to the Logs page. As you can see it’s easy, uncomplicated and above all else very slick and uncluttered in its approach to administration. I just wish CISCO or heck even Microsoft would spend as much time as the QNAP does before pushing a product to market! Give yourself an hour or two and you will be a PRO at administering the NVR 101.


The very first page is the Quick Configuration page, and just like the name states this is a short answer based wizard for changing the configuration of the NVR 101. Yes you will already have done this when you installed the NVR 101 just a short while ago, but in a year or three when you upgrade your network infrastructure this handy little built in wizard will make reconfiguring your surveillance system a breeze. We loved seeing this included in QNAP’s Network Attached Storage and we love that QNAP carried it over to the their surveillance line.


The System Setting page is where you can rename the server and change the date or time without needing to go through the whole setup wizard again. This is a great time saver if for example you want to rename the NVR 101, you would simply go to the server name subpage, type in the new name and press apply. Extremely easy and user friendly to say the least! Heck, QNAP even added in a View System Settings page so you can tell at a glance how everything is configured!


The Network Settings page is very similar to the Quick Configuration page but instead of having to go through the whole process you can just change one (or many) things that deal with how the NVR talks to the network. One very nice feature is DDNS or Dynamic DNS, which with (as with QNAP NAS) you can set up the NVR so that you can remotely administer and view the camera via the internet. For anyone who clicked on the manufacturer demo you know how easy it can be to keep tabs on what is happening even when you are not connected to your home’s / business’ internal network. This feature alone makes the NVR 101 price seem cheap! Just remember to set a strong password and change it often, otherwise other people will be able to see what is happening on the camera as well….ick.


As the name suggests the Admin Device Configuration page is where you configure your hard drive devices. OK maybe that is a little vague but only until one realizes that more than just the internal hard drive can be used by the NVR 101 to record data to! You can hook up USB enclosures, eSATA enclosures and even have the NVR 101 check for bad sectors (just like QNAP NAS devices can). The best thing about this is you can easily set up a RAID 1 using the internal SATA drive and an external eSATA device. This gives one the option of doing backups to an external hard drive which can then be taken off sight for disaster recovery management! When we first heard about the NVR 101 we never imagined that a starter kit costing less that $1000 would have such advanced features built in. Jolly good show QNAP, jolly good.

The User Management Features is another area that is just down right astounding. What an administrator can do with this feature is give different people access to different cameras while at the same time seamlessly removing access from others! This is a great feature that many a SOHO or even Small / Medium Business admin will love having. For home users it probably is going to be of limited value but if you have IP Cameras set up in “sensitive areas”. However, you propably don’t want your kids to access to the cameras so this feature may make just seal the deal for you; and no we are not going to comment on the legality of recording yourself or your kids without everyone's previous written consent.


The Camera Settings allows a person to configure all the connected cameras and tweak their settings to your heart's content without having to manually log into each camera and tweak them individually. This by itself makes this a good and useful administration feature, but what makes it a great feature is the ability to tweak how said camera files are recorded, when they start to record and even when they should stop. For example if you have Camera 2 set to record only upon motion alarm you can set the NVR to record 30 seconds (or any number you wish) before and after the incident occurs! This takes the motion security recording option to a whole new level. Once again it is little tweaks like this that show how much effort QNAP put into making he NVR 101 as user friendly as possibly.


The System Tools pages are where you can do all the normal administration things like setting up email alerts, rebooting the NVR 101, backing up and even restoring your custom settings and other things that we have come to expect from quality QNAP products. One thing that really stands out is the ability to “e map” your camera setup. What this means is you can (with the help of a jpg image) give a graphical representation of where you have setup your cameras. This may not sound like a big deal, but trust me nothing beats having an actual map when you are troubleshooting camera issues and it has been six months since you set the darn things up and you have no idea what camera is located where! This is one of those simple yet brilliant ideas where everyone else goes “why didn’t I think of that!”. Well the wizards at QNAP did and boy is it ever a handy feature to have!


Just as with QNAP NAS devices the Log and Stats pages give you a fairly basic way of tracking error and other details that you may otherwise miss. For example, if you wake up one morning to find your system shut off, you can simply reboot it and check the logs to see what happened. It will not always be able to tell you what happened but an unscheduled, non graceful shutdown at 3:21am (for example) will give you a good place to start. That of course is the worst case scenario, if for example the log shows it was shut down due to overheating then you know either the fan has stopped working or sticking the NVR101 in a cupboard was a bad idea!