This video demonstrates the detailed configuration of Windows Vista and Internet Explorer that is required to get them to work with GeoVision's ActiveX Controls.
Transcript
Configuring Windows Vista & Internet Explorer to Work with GeoVision’s ActiveX Controls – How To
This is Eric with ApexCCTV. Welcome to our training video on how to properly configure security settings in Windows and Internet Explorer to allow the use of GeoVision’s ActiveX controls. There are quite a few security updates to both Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista that prevent the use of ActiveX Controls at all under default security configurations.
So, the first thing I’ll do is log into our demo DVR and just show you what happens when we give it a shot. The first thing that happens is Internet Explorer’s security bar pops up and warns us that an ActiveX control is trying to be installed. And you may be familiar with this, if you click this bar and go ahead and try to install the ActiveX control, it will reload the webpage. And we should see a permission window to allow us to install the ActiveX control. And this is misleading, it actually won’t work. But I’ll give it a shot just to show you what happens. When you click install, we’re going to get a progress bar that pops up and shows us that the ActiveX control is loading and installing. And then we get a security warning stating that the file that’s opening has a publisher that can’t be verified. If we try to run it anyway, it will give all appearances of having an installer. And then as soon as we click OK, it’s going to fail and say access is denied. That’s because Windows User Account Control is forcing us to run Internet Explorer with the credentials of a standard user instead of an administrator, even though I’m logged in as an administrator. So, we’ll go ahead and get through this, abort it, quit the setup. And I’ll get Internet Explorer shut down here and show you guys how to do this correctly.
As it turns out, there are actually four different locations that we need to make security setting changes, or that we could potentially make security setting changes. The first one, as I said, is User Account Control, and we can find that under Start button, and then Control Panel, and then User Accounts. If we click this, when the User Account window loads up, there’s a link in the middle that says “Turn User Account Control on or off.” I’ll click this just to show you where the button is, or where the setting is rather, and what it looks like. If we uncheck this checkbox and restart windows, then programs will run under whatever credentials we load the computer or load into Windows as. In this case, since that’s not really a security best practice, I’m going to recommend that you leave this checked. It does simplify a few things to uncheck it, but there’s ways around this which I’ll show you in a minute. So for now, I’m going to cancel out of this dialog.
And I am going to show you one other thing under Start > Control Panel > Programs and Features. In the Programs and Features window, there’s a link on the left side that says “Turn Windows features on or off.” Now, if you’re in a Windows domain, you’ll need to click this link and open up the Windows Features dialog. The first entry in this dialog box is called “ActiveX Installer Service.” By installing this, what you do is allow the domain administrator to select ActiveX Controls that are preapproved for installation by any user. So, I’m on a Windows domain. I need to have this checked. If you’re not on a Windows domain, if you’re just logged onto a workgroup, you can forget all about this setting. For those of you who needed it, I thought I’d give you a quick preview of where to find it. So, let me cancel out of these two dialogs and let’s get back into Internet Explorer.
So, the next thing we need to do is go ahead and load up Internet Explorer again. But this time when we do so, we’re going to right-click on the icon and select this option that says “Run as administrator.” This is just a workaround that Microsoft included in this version of Windows to allow you to run programs with administrative privileges, even though you leave User Account Control running. So, by doing this, I’m going to start Internet Explorer with the permissions that I need to get these ActiveX Controls running. So, we’ll click “Run as administrator.” Then, I’m going to go back up here to the top of the window and we’ll load up the DVR again. I’m just going to leave it on the Login page for now. I need to get to the tool menu, which is on the menu bar. Microsoft for some reason decided to hide the menu bar in this version of Internet Explorer, but to see it all I have to do is hit the ALT key on my keyboard. And now I can click on Tools and Internet Options.
What I need to do at this point is click on the Security tab. Make sure you select Trusted sites list here. We’re going to add our DVR to trusted sites later, so that we’re not affecting our security settings for the Internet or for our local Intranet. What we need to do now is disable Protected Mode. Uncheck this. Click Apply and OK. And I’ll go ahead and close Internet Explorer, which I need to do to allow that new setting to take effect.
The next adjustment I need to make is to add my DVR to the Trusted sites zone. So, I’m going to go ahead and run Internet Explorer as an administrator again. I’ll open my menu bar and click on Tools and Internet options. And under the Security tab on Trusted sites, I’ll click the Sites button. There is a checkbox here that’s checked by default. This box right here that says “Require server verification for all sites in this zone.” This must be unchecked in order to add a GeoVision DVR to your Trusted sites, because by default GeoVision DVRs do not run on a SSL connection. So, we’re going to add https:// and then whatever the IP address of your DVR is. This can also be a fully qualified domain name if you have a DNS setup for your DVR. So, I’m going to add this website and click Close. Now when I browse to the address to my DVR, I’ll be operating under the Trusted sites security setups.
The next thing I need to do is come down to the Custom Level button and make some adjustments under this section titled ActiveX controls and plug-ins. If you’ll notice, many of these settings are disabled by default. There are three levels of security for any given setting: Disable means that you just can’t perform that operation. Prompt means that the user will be warned before performing the operation. And Enable means that the operation will happen automatically without warning the user. What I prefer to do is any setting that is set to Disable, I’ll set it to Prompt if it’s available. And if there is no Prompt option available, I’ll just set it to Enable. So, we’re going to go all the way down this ActiveX Controls list and just very quickly either set all these settings to Prompt or Enable.
Now that we’re finished with that, I’ll click the Ok button to close the Trusted sites security setting dialog. Then click Apply to apply the settings and Ok to keep the changes. So, now I’m in Internet Explorer. If you want to, you would have disabled user access control by now. Now you needed to have launched Internet Explorer with administrative permissions, and you should have added your DVR’s IP address to your Trusted sites list and configured either Prompt or Enable for all of your ActiveX Control settings under custom security level for your trusted sites.
Now that we have all four of those things done, we can finally log into our DVR and go ahead and install any of the ActiveX Controls that we need. And you’ll see this runs right away. It will ask me if I want to install the software. And this installer will take a minute. I’ll just go ahead and let it run. So, now user access control has been disabled by Internet Explorer and the installation for ActiveX control will go ahead and run and finish. And now, finally, we have video running. That means the ActiveX control for live viewing in GeoVision has been installed. We can switch cameras and play around with this control, and do any of the things we would normally do. We can stop, start it. If we had speakers or microphones attached, we could listen to audio. We can take snapshots. We can record the video. We can download the video files to our PC. We’re ready to go. Again, I’m Eric Bertram with ApexCCTV and thank you so much for watching our video tutorial on how to configure ActiveX controls to work correctly with Windows Vista and GeoVision capture cards.
