email message not sent when body has only a token in it.

zmisawesome · Post by **zmisawesome** » Mon Aug 31, 2009 8:21 am

First, let me just say, ZM is really really nice!! Especially for the price! I was previously using a Windows only software from Q-See on a couple of TW6800 (techwell) based cards. Since I have grown to favor Linux over Windows, I bought a couple of WS-DSR404 cards based on the saa7134 chipset from www.computergeeks.com for only like $15 each. For the most part, ZM blows the doors off the commercial Windows based configuration. I have been using ZM for about 2 weeks now and I am never going back to the Windows only solution I had before. Thank you Philip Coombes!

Now, on to the main reason I am posting:

In ZM 1.23.3, if you configure the simple email message option (ZM_OPT_MESSAGE), and set everything up as you like, zmfilter.pl does not consider a ZM_MESSAGE_BODY to be valid if it only contains a token (such as %EIM%) and will therefore NOT send the message at all, _and_ it will not advise you that this is the case, even with all debugging enabled at the log and script level. The zmfilter script just does a 'return 0' with no logging.

Although I don't yet have a suggested patch for this, I wanted to perhaps save some people some troubleshooting time and give a suggested work around.

The work around is to insert a space (or some text char) into the body in addition to your token(s).

Please let me know if this information is redundant or I am completely off my rocker.

Thanks!

haus · Post by **haus** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 1:48 am

It's an old issue; the very bottom of my first post in this thread noted the same thing awhile back:

http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewto ... 7916#37916

Though I was never completely certain if I was the only one who experienced it.

cmgaviao · Post by **cmgaviao** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 2:31 pm

I saw this same card at geeks.com. A bing search (with DSR404 and zoneminder) turned up your post as the only information I could find on it. How do you like it? was it easy to configure? Did you also buy cameras from geeks (the prices seem too good to be true so I'm hesitant to go with the cheaper cams without hearing from someone with actual experience)? If so which ones? My girlfriend's crawlspace has been broken into 2 times in the past 2 months and since her roommate refuses to arm the alarm on his way out... well, at least ZM should help us track down the junkie in question.

Thanks,

Curt

zmisawesome · Post by **zmisawesome** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 7:28 am

haus wrote:It's an old issue; the very bottom of my first post in this thread noted the same thing awhile back:

http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewto ... 7916#37916

Though I was never completely certain if I was the only one who experienced it.

Ahh interesting. I thought I was the only one also. Someday, when I get some rollover minutes, I will write up a patch and post it.

zmisawesome · Post by **zmisawesome** » Sat Sep 19, 2009 7:44 am

cmgaviao wrote:... How do you like it? was it easy to configure?

Well, the WS-DSR404 is a very cheap card, but it's FPS (30-40FPS per port x 4 ports) blows away what I was getting on my original single chip TW cards. I am very happy with the cards (I have 2 of them). They were a breeze to set up despite not having an ID on the PROM (cheap!).

Unfortunately, after about 3 weeks of use one of the cards has suddenly dropped to 3FPS per port (down from ~30-40FPS per port) and hangs my system when ZM is running (buffer errors and such in the logs). This started after a weather change involving high temperatures (my server is in the garage, but its cooling system is very effective). I am not sure if this is a hardware issue caused by temperature, or the mean time before failure is low due to cheap parts, or if I can just configure the problem away. I will post the results of my troubleshooting once I have them.

cmgaviao wrote: Did you also buy cameras from geeks (the prices seem too good to be true so I'm hesitant to go with the cheaper cams without hearing from someone with actual experience)?

I bought my camera's mostly from Fry's Electronics, bit by bit over time. None of them were purchased from geeks so I can't comment there. I will tell you that I am primarily using sub $50 camera's for day time stuff and they work just fine for my purposes (low resolution is OK for me). I have a few night vision camera's that cost a bit more also ($90 - $120 each), which work pretty good as well. Higher resolution camera's are superior of course, but cost a lot more too.

Best of luck to you in your quest to bust the invaders.

zmisawesome · Post by **zmisawesome** » Mon Sep 21, 2009 6:14 am

zmisawesome wrote: Unfortunately, after about 3 weeks of use one of the cards has suddenly dropped to 3FPS per port (down from ~30-40FPS per port) and hangs my system when ZM is running (buffer errors and such in the logs). This started after a weather change involving high temperatures (my server is in the garage, but its cooling system is very effective). I am not sure if this is a hardware issue caused by temperature, or the mean time before failure is low due to cheap parts, or if I can just configure the problem away. I will post the results of my troubleshooting once I have them.

Sorry to quote myself in this reply to my own message. I just wanted to post an update on the drop in FPS I was having because it had nothing to do with ZM or any of the hardware. This was a very frustrating problem to solve. At first I thought ZM was somehow the culprit to my system hanging because when I sudo /etc/init.d/zoneminder start, my system would then hang. Come to find out, it was if I sudo any program. Or login, or reboot, or really, anything having to do with authentication (it seemed). Whenever I ran something like 'sudo ls', the system would just hang for many minutes, if it even came back at all. strace and ltrace showed the problem was related to __syslog_chk and /dev/log, so I started poking around syslog stuff. Behold, there was a typo in the /etc/syslog.conf file (that I made right around the time my system started choking). Even though my logs were all apparently being updated just fine, I corrected the typo in the conf file, and as soon as I did that (and restarted syslog), all the buffer errors (and all other problems I was having in general with the system) cleared right up. I am back in business!!

So let that be a lesson to ya. If you mess up your /etc/syslog.conf file, your system will act VERY STRANGELY until you correct it.

cheers!

floorman007 · Post by **floorman007** » Thu Nov 05, 2009 7:09 am

Perfect, this looks to be in my price range -- I just checked the geeks.com website and they have the card for $27 but it lists the chipset as PLX PCI6140-AA33PC chipset. You post mentions a different chipset. I dont really care either way but want to make sure I can find a linux driver for this card. Can you tell me how or what I need to configure to support this card under linux? Thanks!

zmisawesome · Post by **zmisawesome** » Wed Nov 11, 2009 6:49 am

Hmmm... not sure about the chipset change.. I just went to geeks.com and yeah... they seem to have the same product ID but with a different chip set now... that seems to be a bit deceptive on their part. Bad geeks!!

I know it was very simple to setup with the philips saa7134 chipset, I can't speak to the PCI6140-AA33PC chipset (if that is what the WS-DSR404 is now).

Good luck!! Let us know how it goes!

zmisawesome · Post by **zmisawesome** » Sat Jan 09, 2010 5:33 am

zmaudit.pl is taking a VERY long time to complete. I have 8 cameras and up to 32,000 files in each events/cam# directory.

Please let me know what info is needed to help improve this sluggishness. While zmaudit.pl is running, my system is basically unusable due to the IO usage. Everytime I reboot, zmaudit.pl kicks off, and I have to wait an hour or more for it to complete before the system is usable for anything else.

I thought perhaps enabling "ZM_USE_DEEP_STORAGE" would help, but this has kicked off a zmaudit that has been running for almost 2 days now.

Any constructive help or suggestions are welcome.

zmisawesome · Post by **zmisawesome** » Tue Jan 12, 2010 7:33 am

So, I have been trying to figure out why zmaudit.pl is taking more than 8 hours to complete. Apparently the biggest hold up is on navigating the files in the directory tree. A simple test script shows some disappointing time usage on the disk. Is this normal?

Code: Select all

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my @files = </usr/share/zoneminder/events/$ARGV[0]/*/*/*>;

foreach my $file (@files) {
  print $file . "\n";
}

Here are some results of running this:

Code: Select all

jbutler@newkid:~/bin$ time ./test.pl 1
/usr/share/zoneminder/events/1/10/01/08
/usr/share/zoneminder/events/1/10/01/09
/usr/share/zoneminder/events/1/10/01/11

real	0m3.165s
user	0m0.280s
sys	0m2.884s
jbutler@newkid:~/bin$ time ./test.pl 2
/usr/share/zoneminder/events/2/10/01/08
/usr/share/zoneminder/events/2/10/01/09
/usr/share/zoneminder/events/2/10/01/11

real	0m45.943s
user	0m0.536s
sys	0m9.145s

Yikes! 46 seconds just to get a glimpse into the depth of this directory tree? That seems excessive. This test script uses the same method that the zmaudit script uses. Any suggestions on how to improve the performance on this? zmaudit is taking so long to finish that the MySQL connection times out before it finishes running.

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