Missing zoneminder service

[tippers]

Hi,

I was running v1.28.1 on Ubuntu Server 14.04 but I've just logged in to check the captured data and found the service is stopped. I can'tr restart it from the website or SSH console.

When I run "service --status-all" I don't see the zoneminder service. Trying "service zoneminder start" returns "zoneminder: unrecognized service".

The /boot partition was 98% full so I ran "apt-get autoremove" which has freed up space and now is only 32% in use. I thought I'd try upgrading to 1.29 to see if the service was re-registered but it wasn't so now I have 1.29 running but still can't start the service.

I'm not very experienced with Ubuntu and don't know why the service registration of zoneminder has disappeared or how to recreate it and can't find any similar issues online.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Regards

Chris

[bbunge]

Suggest you check the WIKI for the upgrade procedure.

[tippers]

Yep followed the upgrade procedure but problem existed before and still exists now. Zoneminder seems to still be there and working apart from the service to run it, how do I recreate it?

[bbunge]

Your comments do not make sense! If ZM is working the service must be started. Can you view your ZM in your web browser? Are you sure you are using 14.04? If you upgraded to 15.x or higher ZM does not run as a service (systemd) as in 14.04.

You may be farther ahead to start with a fresh install of Ubuntu...

[tippers]

Sorry if I'm not making sense but I'm confused too as to why it has stopped working.
I can access the login page http://<ip address>/zm and login. Once logged in there are no motion detected events appearing and at the top of the screen it shows Stopped. Clicking on Stopped prompts me to click apply to try and start the service but it refreshes and is still stopped.
Attempt to start the zoneminder service from ssh console gives unrecognised service error.

I'm definitely using Ubuntu Server 14.04 and upgraded zoneminder to 1.29 from 1.28.1.

Surely there is just something missing to get it working again rather than a whole reinstall?

I think it stems from a power cut last weekend when the Ubuntu Server VM was not shutdown correctly but I don't know what it could have done to stop zoninder working or how to troubleshoot the problem as my Linux skills are basic.

[asker]

Yep followed the upgrade procedure but problem existed before and still exists now. Zoneminder seems to still be there and working apart from the service to run it, how do I recreate it?

bbunge is right, you did an auto remove and its hard to know what it has or has not removed.
What you see when you go to the zoneminder portal is simply web files that apache is showing. It does not mean zoneminder's core components are running or even existing.

For example, go to /usr/bin and do an "ls zm*" - do you see files like zmc and zmf and zmpkg.pl ? If not, your files have been deleted.
If they are there, it would still be hard to know what state your system is in.

We could possibly try and figure out why your service disappeared if those files are still there, but I really don't think it would be worth the time. Is a re-install not an option for you? It will be easier

[tippers]

Right, so yes the web server is working and when I go to the /usr/bin directory and list the zm* files they are all still there.

Is it not quite simple to re-create the service in Linux? I could do a re-install but would I lose my stored events? Just seems that would take longer than to re-create the service. If it still doesn't work once re-created then I agree it might not be worth troubleshooting further and to do a re-install.

[tippers]

So it seems that the permissions on the startup script (/etc/init.d/zoneminder) had been changed as it wasn't showing as green text when listing the directory. By changing the permissions (chmod +x /etc/init.d/zoneminder; I guess this adds the execute permission) to the file it works.

[asker]

Thats great. An example of something that would be very hard for us to know - glad you got it worked out