The panel

The panel – cloud-panel.openipc.ru – is where the cloud is run from: cameras, access, notifications, people, sign-in. There are seven sections, and what follows is mostly the parts that are not obvious at a glance.

One rule is worth knowing before the rest: until a device is claimed, its stream is served to nobody – including you. An unclaimed device belongs to no one, and there is no one to show it to.

Live view

Tiles for all of your cameras. "Open stream" hands you a link to watch, and it lives sixty seconds – that is the deadline for starting to watch, not for watching: an open stream is not cut off.

Under the camera's name is how the traffic gets there:

direct path – you and the camera connected directly;
via the relay – a direct connection did not come up and the video goes through the cloud. That is how some networks are, and there is nothing to fix;
no connection – the camera has not been in touch.

The "Controls" button appears for a camera that advertises ONVIF, and for a person who is allowed to control it. How that works and who may do what is in Control away from home.

A camera that said nothing about itself is taken for an ordinary OpenIPC camera: the cloud fills in the usual ports for it, and the button appears. If ONVIF is in fact switched off on that camera, the controls say so – they show what the camera answered, and on which port. That is not the cloud breaking: switch ONVIF on in the camera's own settings, and if it listens somewhere other than port 80, the camera has to name that port when it connects.

The "Share" button on your camera mints a link that plays the picture right in a browser: the person you send it to needs neither an account nor an app. The link shows video only – no controls, no settings, no camera password. You pick how long it lives when you mint it: an hour, a day, a week, a month or until revoked; a label ("for the neighbour") tells you later which link went to whom. Under the picture the recipient gets a snapshot, clip recording and an HD/SD switch: the lighter stream helps on a slow connection.

Anyone holding the link can watch, so send it to the person you are showing the camera to. You can revoke it at any time: new connections are refused at once, and a page that is already open goes dark within a few minutes. Links also stop working once the camera leaves your account. Only the camera's owner can share it this way – a guest with access cannot pass it on.

How to connect

Your one-shot enrolment token and the order to connect a camera in. The token is always minted into your own network: you could not issue one into someone else's if you tried.

Devices and network

The list of nodes: what kind each one is, who fronts it, what address it has in your network and what it advertised about itself. The map of who can see whom is here too.

Next to each node is the version of the agent running on it. A question mark instead of a number means the node never named one: that is what an agent older than this field looks like. The line tells you who an update has already reached and who it has not.

Two buttons in a node's row are worth naming:

Commands – restart the agent, or reboot the device.
RTSP – the login and password the cloud pulls the stream with. Needed when the firmware requires authentication; stored encrypted and never handed back out – the list only shows that they are set.

Below that are your networks and the minting of enrolment tokens, including in batches: as many devices as you say.

Access

This is where a camera is shared with a person. Access is granted on a device, to a person, and no keys or device passwords are passed along with it. The role decides what that person may do – the table is in Control away from home.

The other side of the same section is "Accept an invitation": if a camera was shared with you, the token you were given goes in here.

Notifications

Where the cloud writes when a camera drops and comes back: the account's email (it is there from the start), Telegram, a webhook. Also how long to wait before writing, and which cameras to leave out. Details are in Notifications.

People

Only the owner of the instance – the account it was brought up under – can add people. Everyone gets their own account and their own token; nobody needs a shared login. This is also where the owner issues beta invite codes: with a code, a person creates their own account and gets a network of their own.

The password and the second factor. Until the second factor is bound, the account lives on the password alone – bind it right away, the panel holds access to every camera you own.

There is no recovery by email for anyone, the owner included: a lost password is reset by the owner of the instance, by hand. This is also where the owner issues someone a new token if theirs is lost.

Sessions

Every client holds a session of its own: the panel in the browser, the app, a phone, a script. The list lives under "Sign-in": what opened it, when it was created, when it was last used. Any of them can be closed on its own, and closing one does nothing to the others.

A token for a second client is issued right there – "Issue a token", having named the client. It is shown once; enter it in the application you issued it for. That is the point: one token spread across two devices means signing out in one place kills access in the other, and a lost phone forces you to change the credential on your laptop too.

The list holds no tokens – the cloud keeps only their hashes. It exists to close what is no longer needed, not to recover what was lost: a lost token is replaced by a new one, never restored.