User's Guide

Connecting and Configuring an Ethernet Edge-device
The FM unit Ethernet ports can be used to connect all kinds of Ethernet
edge devices (e.g. IP Cameras, Video-Servers, Wi-Fi Access Points, etc.).
Any Ethernet device can be configured either manually or automatically
through a DHCP server.
A manual IP setting is recommended in any video-surveillance system where
the cameras need to have a fixed custom IP address to be accessed by the
video-recording software.
Figure 5.3: Network configuration with two port-based VLANs.
VLAN Tagging (Software Plug-in Required)
Virtual LAN (VLAN) tagging (or IEEE 802.1q) is a networking standard al-
lowing multiple switched networks to transparently share the same physical
hardware without the leakage of information between networks. For exam-
ple, consider a company with several departments. With VLAN tagging,
a separate private logical network is made available for each department
while using only one physical corporate network. Each VLAN is identified
by a specific number called VLAN ID (VID) which is also used for tagging
packets belonging to the same VLAN. Because VLANs are based on logi-
cal instead of physical connections, several types of VLANs exist based on
the criteria adopted to logically separate networks. The traditional VLAN
scheme is port-based where each physical Ethernet port is configured
specifying membership in a VLAN. However, if there are requirements that
27