Zoneminder on Lucid Howto

[wyliecoyoteuk]

Noticed a lot of questions about this, couldn't easily find a simple answer ( a lot of them were far too involved)

So I am posting this in the hope that it will help.

Install zoneminder from the repositories.
Apache and MySQL will also be installed, if they are not already.
It will ask you for a MySQL root username and password DO NOT FORGET THIS.

Add a link in the apache (webserver) config directory

$ sudo ln -s /etc/zm/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d/zoneminder.conf

If apache is not running, start it

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start

If apache is already running, restart it

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload



setup zm

$ sudo chmod 4755 /usr/bin/zmfix

$ zmfix -a

$ sudo adduser www-data video



Shared memory settings need to be chnaged for ZoneMinder

$ sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf

add this at bottom (128 MB)

kernel.shmall = 134217728 kernel.shmmax = 134217728

save and exit.

TEST http://localhost/zm should open Zoneminder screen.
Default user=admin password=admin

Good luck

(Thanks to the various posts that I garnered this from)

I am running this on my Mythbuntu install, but it should work for Standard Ubuntu too.

[Tomy]

Thanks, that was easy.

I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick and this HowTo worked perfectly.

[wyliecoyoteuk]

Glad to be of help

[wyliecoyoteuk]

Just updated Mythbuntu to 10.10, had to redo the shared memory entry in sysctrl, but it still works fine.

[wkulecz]

Thanks great starting pont.

Two quick questions.

I didn't get a password prompt for the initial setup login and can't seem to monitor the image from my camera. (edit: doh! after I closed the monitor setup window, clicking the "name" "Monitor-1 opened the watch window.)


How do I configure it to activate the X10 interface? The X10 tab in the Monitor setup window is missing.

[wyliecoyoteuk]

Sorry, no idea about X10, I don't have any X10 devices.
I would start at the X10 tab in the options screen

Edit, click on "options" on the left hand side of the screen, then enable x10 in the x10 tab.
You can then configure it in the monitor setup.

[wkulecz]

There was an checkbox option in console->options window to enable X10 support which made the X10 tab appear on the device setup window. Unfortunatley seems X10 support is broken in this version -- found a blurb about it with possible workaround here:
http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=15792 but for now I've dsabled X10 support again.

Unfortunatley I've bigger problems, while zoneminder seems to work great once I figured out how to configure it, it has locked up three times since Saturday, worst was this morning when the whole system was dead -- not even a caps lock LED toggle. Had to powercycle to reboot Up to now this system has not been down except for power outages and reboot required updates since I installed it in April 2010 so I have to suspect either zoneminder or the no reboot required updates that waited for me on Saturday.

Its a quard core file server with 8GB of RAM and letting it do the video security system makes a lot of sense. I had a dedicated Windows based DVR video security system that has been more reliable than the power company (as long as I remembered to reboot it every 45 days) untill it died when we had a "rolling blackout" during last weeks cold snap. Both these systems are on APC UPSes and stay up for 20-30 minutes after the power goes down so short interruptions cause no outages.

If zoneminder keeps crashing I'll need to buy another windows box or dedicated DVR video system this week

How is zoneminder working for you?

[wyliecoyoteuk]

I run Zoneminder on an Athlon 4850e with 2GB of ram.It also runs MythTV, with no trouble.

I remember having similar problems with the driver for my UVC camera, until I switched off verbose mode, it kept filling /var/logs with error messages, to the extent that my root partition filled up.
I redirected the log file to /dev/null until I could figure it out.

[wkulecz]

I turned off all the logging, statistics, and debugging & X10 stuff I could find. It has stayed up for 24 hours since the bad crash/lockup. Mine's a quad core, I suspect there might be issues with "true parallism" in the controlling scripts when changing things to figure out what modes best meet my needs. I also doubled the intervals at which the various perl scripts are run when I could find such an option.

I've three video cards and six cameras, but over 1.5TB free space on the root partition.

So far its totally immune to false alarms compared to my old system, but its got to be more reliable than the power company to be useful. TIme will tell. I also like getting Emailed video clips instead of five or six still.

Where are the video clips it Emails stored? I can't seem to find them. I'm a little unclear on the "archive" feature, but I doubt I want to archive anything. I made a filter to delete events older than 1-day and it seems to work, eventually I'd make this maybe a week or two, no need to save anything more than that.

[wyliecoyoteuk]

I would look on the Zoneminder Wiki and forums.
I am not really a Zoneminder expert, just posted this to help some people struggling to make sense of the basic install, as there seemed a lot of conflicting information, when setting it up was really pretty straightforward.