Hi UI1,
If the cameras are running older firmware that still uses Basic authentication instead of Digest authentication, you can use Wireshark to get the username and password. Instead of running a trace on every camera and having to sort through it, you can do the following which will capture just Basic authentication usernames and passwords, decode them, and save them to a text file. The steps below assume a 64-bit OS and 64-bit version of Wireshark.
1. Install Wireshark (64-bit version) on the server(s) communicating to the cameras (typically the recording server).
2. Open a command prompt and type the following and press Enter:
cd "c:\program files\wireshark"
3. Type "dumpcap -D" and press Enter. This will return all of the network adapters. It will look something like this. The name at the end in parenthesis is the same name that shows up in the network settings within Windows. Take note of the number of the network adapter that is on the same network as your cameras.
4. Type the following at the command prompt. Change the "X" to the number of the network adapter you noted above.
tshark -i X -T fields -e ip.dst -e http.authbasic -Y "http.authbasic" > %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\CameraCredentials.txt
5. You will see something like this indicating that it is "Capturing on <name of NIC>":
6. Now, stop the recording service and start it back up. In most, if not all, VMSs this will force the recording service to try to authenticate to all of the cameras. At this point, if any cameras are using Basic authentication, you will see a number start appearing like the screenshot below. This indicates how many credentials it is capturing.
7. Once the recording service has been back up and running for a while (give it a few minutes to make sure it has connected to all of the cameras), press Ctrl+C on the command prompt window to stop the script.
8. Open the CameraCredential.txt file that should be on the desktop. If it has captured anything, it will look like this (it might capture the same credentials multiple times depending on how authentication is done). You can copy and paste this into Excel so you can do sorting and remove duplicates easier.
If it doesn't capture anything, you can try a different network adapter (in case you aren't certain of which network adapter the cameras are communicating on) or try it on another recording server. Odds are that most, if not all, of the cameras are set to the same password so if you can just find one camera that is set to Basic authentication, it should help across the board and save you from having to reset all of the cameras.
Also, if by chance stopping and starting the recording service doesn't force the recording server to authenticate to the cameras, you can try disabling and enabling the cameras. This takes more time but also usually forces an authentication.