I am not sure if any of you guys can help me here but lets give it a go. I have been asked to setup a system whereby you can view video cameras setup in a shop environment and view them from home. The system in the shop works Ok, I have contacted the ISP and they have given us a fixed IP address. The operating system on all pc's is Windows XP, the camera software and remote viewing software are by Geovision.
I have setup the camera software at the shop to act as a TCP/IP server and have tried setting up the remote viewing software to conect to the fixed ip address but without success. I have tried pinging the address but no reply.
My thoughts at the moment make me wonder if its the firewal on the broadband router.
Any suggestions would be gratefully received.

Yes, it is most certainly the firewall and NAT on the broadband router. You should read up on port forwarding in general and Read The Friendly (router) Manual.

Thanks for the help nodsu, I have setup the router to allow port forwarding on the relevant port and for the fixed ip address we have but I am still unable to access the system. I have tried pinging the ip address again and it still times out, any other suggestions?

I have setup the port forwarding as suggested here http://portforward.com/english/route...RemoteView.htm

OK. Your router should also respond to ping. You may have to enable this feature somewhere. It may be named something really obscure like "enable WAN request".

Are you pinging and trying to connect from an external location? Many routers do not suppor loopback connections and any access from the LAN side will fail.

Check with your ISP whether inbound connections are allowed. Many ISPs block incoming connections for some plans.

I did originally try to get into the camera system over the internet using the pc the system is installed on, but I have also carried out the same checks from my pc at home. I think I need to look at the router settings again.