Well, just a few months into using a Thingino-flashed WyzeCam3, I noticed that one of the units had stopped responding.

I could see it connecting to the network (or at least taking a DHCP lease from the router), but all connection attempts failed. The LED was lit, but I couldn’t tell what it was doing. I shut it down, and checked the SD Card — the last motion it had captured was from fifteen hours ago, although there was plenty of room left on the card. Something was weird.

I powered it back up, confirmed that it was connecting to the network, and checked to see if it was actually offering any network services. This was where things got weirder:

#nmap -Pn 192.168.x.x
Starting Nmap 7.99 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2026-08-05 08:49
Nmap scan report for MuhCam.lan (192.168.x.x)
Host is up (0.051s latency).
Not shown: 999 filtered tcp ports (no-response)
PORT   STATE SERVICE
53/udp open  ssh

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 11.03 seconds

Say what!? Running sshd with UDP listening on the DNS port!? I’ve seen strange configurations in my time, but I haven’t seen that. Also, trying to ssh to that port didn’t work.

The fact that it connected to WiFi told me that it was mostly booting, but this made me think there was some corruption in the config files. It made no sense.

I was getting ready to open it up and see if there was a way I could hook up to a serial console or some other desperate measure, when I saw it flash the IR LEDs briefly, but not very brightly. This roused suspicion. Out of curiosity, I swapped the USB cable that it uses for power. Slightly different results now:

#nmap -Pn 192.168.x.x
Starting Nmap 7.99 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2026-08-05 09:14
Nmap scan report for MuhCam.lan (192.168.x.x)
Host is up (0.029s latency).
Not shown: 999 filtered tcp ports (no-response)
PORT STATE SERVICE
123/udp open ssh

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 10.19 seconds

OK, so now it says that sshd is listening on the NTP port? So whatever was corrupting the config files was not a one-time thing. Was it filesystem issues? Memory corruption? Failing hardware?

I thought Id’ try one more thing. I unplugged it, and plugged the original USB cable into a different A/C adapter.

What do you know? It came up cleanly, with the configuration intact! It was the power supply!

For the record, the normal nmap output looks more like:

#nmap -Pn 192.168.x.x            
Starting Nmap 7.99 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2026-08-05 09:27
Nmap scan report for MuhCam.lan (192.168.x.x)
Host is up (0.0053s latency).
Not shown: 994 closed tcp ports (conn-refused)
PORT     STATE SERVICE
22/tcp   open  ssh
53/tcp   open  domain
80/tcp   open  http
443/tcp  open  https
554/tcp  open  rtsp
8080/tcp open  http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 1.72 seconds