Several users of the Dericam H502W (Cybernova WIP604MW, and equivalent...) have reported the appearance of an "Invalid License File" warning in their System Information page after a firmware update.While the exact cause is still undetermined, some precaution should be taken before applying a new firmware.
Prior to any change to the firmware of your H.264 IP Camera, you should make a backup of its board.dat file, which can be extracted by visiting your IP Camera with the url: http://<youIPCurl>/board.dat
This constitutes your license file in case you end up with a Invalid License File warning. It could then be re-installed via the auth.htm page (you should take a snapshot of your own page also, while all is ok). Only the manufacturer can provide a new valid license file. The board.dat is unique to each device so it won't help to upload one from someone else!
The Dericam, Cybernova and other Maygion-based H.264 IP Cameras are assigned with a unique Hardware Identification (HID), a User ID (for the newer ones, adding P2P support) and a free DDNS ID (all visible in that auth.htm page mentionned above).
Apparently, a compound of this data is challenged against the encrypted board.dat file, and any mismatch results in an invalid license situation.
In theory all this information burned-in the camera at factory should not be affected by firmware upgrade and not easy to damage even through FTP access, but several cases have been reported already, all following update from very official firmware.
This situation is known to cause the following problems:
- It prevents the IPC to use the P2P function
- It makes the IPC reboot at interval of 10 minutes (cs.log file in /app would show [reboot for invalid auth file])
Why this?
The cause is not clear but I suspect the older production of this IP Camera to be particularly affected once they get updated with a certain firmware version. The introduction of P2P maybe changed the way the license file is validated. I'll update this section if I ever get more information.