Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I installed the 4 camera system w/ NVR (RLK8-410B4 8CH 4-Megapixel POE NVR Kit) for outside use. The NVR and cameras automatically stream/relay all of your cameras/videos through the company's servers. This is to make it easy for the common person to access their cameras remotely without forwarding ports on their home router, but this is **BAD**. The problem is they didn't put an option to disable this functionality. That's right, this company has complete access to your NVR, cameras, and potentially your home network because of this MASSIVE security hole. I emailed Reolink regarding this weeks ago and was told, “We are working on a firmware update to allow you to disable this functionality and we will keep you updated via email.” I haven't heard anything since, and no firmware update has been released for either NVR or camera to resolve this massive security hole and invasion of privacy. If you think Reolink isn't storing or watching your videos, I've got a bridge to sell you. Installation was all right, but the ethernet dongle could be a little smaller. I had to drill some fairly large holes around my house in order to cram it inside. The cameras, however, feel much better built than I thought they would, and I am happy with the video quality they're providing. The NVR setup was also fairly smooth. However, I don't like the fact you have to console the NVR in order to apply firmware updates to it and the cameras. The cameras themselves will allow you to apply firmware updates directly from the webui, but the NVR restricts you from accessing the cameras directly; therefore, you're forced to put the firmware updates for NVR/cameras on a usb stick, plug it into the NVR, and console it. If the cameras have the ability to apply from webui, why would you not bake that into your NVR? Earlier, I mentioned the fact the Reolink NVR/cameras stream all of your videos to the company's servers. The NVR/cameras are also constantly sending out network ssdp/broadcast traffic to your LAN pretty much every second (in between them attempting to connect to half a dozen internet based servers you're unable to disable) Why clog up the LAN with so much unneeded traffic? Is it because you're constantly scanning for devices? Why would you be doing that? You have a 'scan for devices button' if I wanted you to scan, I would click scan. Also, the NVR has a maintenance section where you can setup a weekly reboot (good idea) that defaults to 2AM on Sunday. I changed this to 4PM on Sunday. The only problem is that each individual camera has a maintenance section as well, and you guessed it: they have a default 2AM Sunday reboot time. If these cameras are plugged into their NVR you're not going to be able to access the cameras’ webui to change this option due to Reolink placing them on a restricted private network. The NVR should have more control over each individual camera. I should not have to worry about the default camera settings I can't easily access. The Reolink NVR has an option to email you when a motion alert on a camera is triggered. This option appears to work fine with GMail... when I attempted to use my own SMTP/Postfix server, though, it was a world of hurt. The NVR email options want: SSL/TLS ON/OFF? Server: smtp.host.com To: address - From: address Password: pass The problem here is that I was unable to get it working without doing two things 1. enable SSL/TLS in postfix. Reolink’s option to turn that ON/OFF didn't appear to do anything for me. 2. set postfix/dovecot to allow you to use the full email address as a login name. by default postfix/sendmail etc want a username without the realm (@domain.com) - Reolink's setup uses the From: address by default as your username for SMTP authentication (which works great with GMail... just poorly with everything else out of the box) The Reolink NVR has the ability to FTP captured videos. This is great. Their client doesn't appear to support passive mode at all. It supports active only. After learning the NVR/Cameras stream/relay all of my videos to god knows where on the internet, I created a DMZ and placed the NVR in it, so FTP was a bit of a challenge since their built-in client didn't support passive mode. Nevertheless, I was finally able to get active mode working with minimal firewall holes. The FTP activity is very weird. Sometimes it appears to connect 4 times and just hangout without attempting to send a file (I sniffed the traffic), but it still appears to be working when there is a video to send. There are a lot of false motion alerts at night when the cameras are relying on IR. I have turned down the sensitivity to as low as it will go, but I still receive them fairly regularly. I have one camera in my garage and get a fair amount of alerts in there at night. Overall I think the cameras produce decent video quality, and they feel well constructed. I believe Reolink needs to do some major work on the software side of things for both the NVR and Cameras. They've got to know how insecure their current system is and how it's absolutely an invasion of privacy for every single customer that buys these products from them. ***** EDITED 04/17/2016 ***** After this review Reolink was extremely responsive via email. I received several emails letting me know their progress with adding an option to disable the P2P relay service. They provided me with a pre-release version of the firmware which had some hiccups in the beginning, but they worked with me until it was functional. I'm happy to say it appears the option to disable P2P works. It's available if you console the NVR directly and does not appear to be available from the web or client UI. Once you opt to disable P2P the NVR will inform you that it is rebooting. I monitored the switch port it was connected to for quite some time and saw zero evidence of it attempting to contact any address for relay purposes. I have to say I'm honestly surprised by Reolink correcting this issue as fast as they did. I was also impressed by their email support. In the end they were very prompt and actually delivered on my main complaint. One thing I noticed when attempting to pick apart their firmware: There is a dvr.xml file that appears to contain parameters Previous firmware: support_rtspauth="1" support_onvifauth="1" support_onvif="1" support_rtsp="1" New fimware: support_rtspauth="0" support_onvifauth="0" support_onvif="0" support_rtsp="0" support_change_dvr_cameramode="0" It looks like they disabled onvif and rtsp on the NVR. This shouldn't effect Reolink cameras at all, but might possibly cause issues if you're using other 3rd party cameras with the NVR. --- LAN portscan to the NVR running the previous firmware version: PORT STATE SERVICE VERSION 80/tcp open http BusyBox httpd 1.13 554/tcp open rtsp? 6001/tcp open X11:1? 8000/tcp open tcpwrapped 9000/tcp open cslistener? LAN portscan to the NVR running the new firmware version: PORT STATE SERVICE 80/tcp open http 9000/tcp open cslistener --- As you can see we no longer have a listener on the default Onvif port, and the RTSP port is also not listening for requests. Just included this for those of you that do have multiple camera types connected to this unit (I'm not even sure if they officially support that anyway)