several annoyances

[gnuorder]

I have had zm running for some time now and it runs well for the most part but there are several annoyances. I have 3 remote cameras running as 6 zones, 1 time lapse record and 1 modect for each. I also have a time lapse zone on the composite of a bttv TV card. I use a pentium 766MHz CPU with 512mb RAM running gentoo.

Every now and then, one of the zones will get stuck and stop updating. Nothing I seem to do will get it started again. I've looked for errors on that zone and there is nothing out of the ordinary. PS sometimes shows a zombied process. Also, this sometimes causes problems with apache responding. When I click on a zone, I get the image in some cases but no events or even the text. Sometimes I can't even get the images. CPU usage doesn't look any worse than before. I usually end up having to kill everything zm and apache and restart it all to get it running right.

Also, I can only start and stop zm using the web option for that. The zm init script doesn't work with gentoo and zmpkg.pl ususlly seems to hang trying to shut down or restart. With the problem above, I usually have to manually killall the zm processes and make sure they are all dead before I can restart apache. Does anyone have a working init script for gentoo? Any idea why zmpkg.pl gives me trouble?

Last problem is with the bttv card. I can't get it to select the right channel, or perhaps not at all as I get a blank image, unless I first run it with xawtv. I set up the composite input and then zm with pick it up. Then after running a while, it seems to loose the channel and I have to do it again. Any idea how to force that to stay on composite?

[securiteaze]

First, an init script for gentoo* ...http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3924
Second, did you change

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$command = “su “.ZM_WEB_USER.” --shell=/bin/sh --command=’$command’”;

To

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$command = “su “.ZM_WEB_USER.” –c ’$command’”;

Third, the user that zm runs as ( apache by default ) needs /bin/bash as their shell.

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usermod -s /bin/bash apache

Test it ... The following command will return the status of zm when properly configured, otherwise it outputs a blank line

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zmpkg.pl status

*The init script uses zmpkg.pl, so you'll need to fix it before you can use the script.

[ma77hias]

I don't know if it is related, but I had a similar problem of my zmc process locking up.
I found out that I was producing race conditions (I mean two processes set to run at the same time and the system not beeing able to decide which one to run) By me it was a cron script and ZM checking for locked up capturing deamons,
Check if your intervals are overlaping.

[gnuorder]

That helped with the middle problem I still seem to have the other 2 problems. Is there something I can run in cron to select the composite output for now? Running xawtv remotely through ssh on a box where mem use is near max is a bit slow.

[zoneminder]

On the camera where you want to select the composite input are you using another input on the same device as well? If so then the input should be selected for each capture. If not then it is selected once and left at that. If something else comes along and changes it (though I don't know what could/would) it will never be put back again. I have made a note to put an option in the next verion to force this every time, I can probably do you a patch if you want it before then, or tell you what to change.

Phil,

[gnuorder]

I only use the composite for now but I have to use xawtv to set it using xawtv to begin with. Also the TV card stopped responding twice now. It's an older card so I'm trying another card now.

Apache and the zm processes still stop responding after a while. I can restart apache but the zp processes I still have to kill off before I can get things running again. It seems they continue to gather images and process them but I can't get the web interface to respond.