Control problems on zoneminder not on LAN [solved]

[th]

I'm using zoneminder on a CentOS server to query a camera at someone's house. It works pretty well when the upstream bandwidth at the person's house is clean.

Anyhow.

So he has a Cisco/Linksys WVC-210 camera and I'm working on getting the control portion of it to work. I used the info from here: http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13484

I had to install an extra perl rpm to get it working but it appears functional. But its having a heck of a time reaching the remote system for the control calls.

I get the following errors:

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Feb 23 00:07:54 zmhost zmcontrol[14405]: ERR [Error check failed: '500 Can't connect to 192.168.100.189:80 (connect: Connection timed out)'] 
Feb 23 00:07:54 zmhost Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /home/bud/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/ZoneMinder/Control/WVC210.pm line 111, <CLIENT> line 1. 
Feb 23 00:07:54 zmhost print() on closed filehandle STDOUT at /home/bud/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/ZoneMinder/Control/WVC210.pm line 111, <CLIENT> line 1. 

As you can see, its trying to reach the internal IP. I have configured the correct remote hostname in the Control tab.

Control Address - admin:pass@blah.dyndns.org:12345

That same password and hostname and port works for gathering the images to save. But for the control script it seems to be translating it back to the internal address at some point.

For lack of better ideas I attempted to change the .pm file so that:

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print( "http://$address/$cmd\n" );

became

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print( "http://admin:pass@blah.dyndns.org:12345/$cmd\n" );

But even then I would see:

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Feb 23 00:01:09 zmhost Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /home/bud/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/ZoneMinder/Control/WVC210.pm line 111, <CLIENT> line 1. 
Feb 23 00:01:09 zmhost print() on closed filehandle STDOUT at /home/bud/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/ZoneMinder/Control/WVC210.pm line 111, <CLIENT> line 1. 

So something is not being called correctly in regards to the camera IP/hostname that the control is using.

I'm really not much in the way of a programmer. So hacking at the perl is a major weakness for me.

Has anyone managed to make controls work through a remote camera? Or does anyone have any suggestions how to make this work from remote?

Thanks in advance!

[th]

Has anyone managed to make controls work through a remote camera? Or does anyone have any suggestions how to make this work from remote?

As it frequently happens, if you leave me in a room alone with Zoneminder long enough I can fix/find the prob.

So. I reinstalled. Not because of this but because I realized I created the file system with far too few inodes and was unable to write events even with 20% of the disk still available.

I'm glad I'm finding these stupid oversights in a test environment.

So this time around I set it all back up and it had similar problems. Not that it was looking at the remote internal address but that it was not picking up the new Control Address at all and the field was processed as blank, giving me the following error:

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02/23/10 23:11:15.102650 zmcontrol[10199].ERR [Error check failed: '500 Can't connect to :80 (Bad hostname '')']

So, the one trick that seemed to help was to go into the site's TMP dir and delete the zmcontrol-1.sock file and restart zone minder. After that, it re-read the most recent Control settings in the Monitor and it worked.

Hopefully this will help someone out there.