Disk considerations, maxlink 32,000 problem

[somepdguy]

Hi Zoneminder people,

We have zoneminder running and it works OK in itself and has done for ages. I have left the installation running since last year and it has looked OK except that last week the police needed some footage from the CCTV system so I logged in and went to bring up the event but there was no actual frames to stream even though ZM had the event in the database. Needless to say the boss was NOT pleased...

Basically what had happened is that ZM had been recording events into the /www/zm/events directory but cameras 10 and 6 both had got to 32,000 directories and then stopped writing to disk due to the limit in EXT2 of 32,000 links per directory. (so it broke about 6 or 7 weeks ago)

Basically what I want to know is if I upgrade the box to reiserfs will this help with the disk limits? I want to leave ZM recording for years with 400 gig of storage without being touched. What implications disk wise do I need to think about with lots of files like that?

Any advice would be good

Pete

[somepdguy]

Common people!! What FS's do you use and have you had similar problems?

[voronwe]

Hi There

Iam using EXT3 witch is default to most fedora core installations, and no i dont know what the link limit is on that vs. ext2, but what i dont get is why you want data / events that are older than 2 - 3 month´s since that data would be obsolete.

In the configs that i make i normally only keep events for 2 month´s and then delete them, but then again here in denmark we have some guidelines from the police that says that you should normaly not keep events longer than 2 weeks.

Consider what would happen in the event of a breakin, if you havent discovered that within 2 month´s somthing else is wrong and not the ZoneMinder installation, and with the 2 month´s of data you should have enogh to see if the burgler have been skoping the site.

[jameswilson]

I have had this but only because of a fault. I shouldnt (using mocord) ever get to 32k per cam. But i beleve reiserfs can handle this

[zoneminder]

Moving to a deeper file structure to avoid the 32k default limit is on the todo list and will probably be along before too long.

[jameswilson]

personally i think that 32k is enough as thats a hell of a lot of events. If another file system fixes it then id prefer that approach to a major change to zm. If your getting lots of little events you could consider makeing he post buffer larger to make what would have been 15 events into 1