ZM 1.29.0 My Opinion review bugs quirks.

[krdoor]

For what it's worth, I was a little sceptic to install zone minder after reading this thread (zone minder is new for me, I was looking for a replacement for my securityspy setup on mac, after my 10y old mac mini died), but to my surprise, zoneminder was up and running in only 40 minutes, even adding my cheap chinese ipcamera was a peace of cake.

So either the docs have improved a lot or I was very lucky

In my situation, I installed zoneminder om my brand new raspberry pi (osmc distro), I only found 1 missing step in the docs. When I had to start zoneminder for the first time, it failed with the message:

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root@XXXXX:~# systemctl start zoneminder.service
Job for zoneminder.service failed. See 'systemctl status zoneminder.service' and 'journalctl -xn' for details.
root@XXXXX:~# systemctl status zoneminder.service
* zoneminder.service - ZoneMinder CCTV recording and surveillance system
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/zoneminder.service; enabled)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sat 2016-10-22 10:25:56 CEST; 5s ago
  Process: 13117 ExecStart=/usr/bin/zmpkg.pl start (code=exited, status=255)

Oct 22 10:25:56 XXXXX zmpkg.pl[13117]: Can't open config file '/etc/zm/zm.conf': Permission denied at /usr/share/perl5/ZoneMinder/Config.pm line 119.

All I had to do was:

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root@XXXXX:~# ls -als /etc/zm/zm.conf                    ## ---> I checked the current permissions 
4 -rwxr----- 1 root root 1316 Feb 21  2016 /etc/zm/zm.conf
root@XXXXX:~# chmod +r /etc/zm/zm.conf                        ## ---> make the cfg world readable 
root@XXXXX:~# systemctl start zoneminder.service
root@XXXXX:~# systemctl status zoneminder.service
* zoneminder.service - ZoneMinder CCTV recording and surveillance system
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/zoneminder.service; enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Sat 2016-10-22 10:27:57 CEST; 2s ago    ## ---> zone minder up and running

Keep up the good work!

Krdoor

[knight-of-ni]

For what it's worth, I was a little sceptic to install zone minder after reading this thread (zone minder is new for me, I was looking for a replacement for my securityspy setup on mac, after my 10y old mac mini died), but to my surprise, zoneminder was up and running in only 40 minutes, even adding my cheap chinese ipcamera was a peace of cake.

So either the docs have improved a lot or I was very lucky

In my situation, I installed zoneminder om my brand new raspberry pi (osmc distro), I only found 1 missing step in the docs. When I had to start zoneminder for the first time, it failed with the message:

Thank you for the feedback.
By the very nature of this forum, most posts are regarding a problem of sort, rather than a report everything worked.

Having been part of this forum myself since 2007, I can tell you that the secret to your success was following the instructions to the letter. Skipping steps in the documentation, or not reading the installation documentation at all, is the number one cause for nearly all of the installation problems in this forum. The number two cause of installation problems is making changes not in the documentation or just overloading your system with too many cameras (be careful of this.... this is very easy to do on a raspberry pi).

Rather than stop and ask at the time of the problem, it is unfortunate that the user who started this thread created a new account and, on his first post, chose to list all his perceived problems in a huge wall of text. While it was constructed well and was not inflammatory, his message is about as useful as that "one guy" in a multiplayer game, who does not say a word during the match, but blurts out "fail team" at the end when your team loses badly. A more proactive approach of posting issues, one at a time, while the op was attempting the installation would have been better and would have more than likely saved the OP a lot of troubleshooting time.

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root@XXXXX:~# systemctl start zoneminder.service
Job for zoneminder.service failed. See 'systemctl status zoneminder.service' and 'journalctl -xn' for details.
root@XXXXX:~# systemctl status zoneminder.service
* zoneminder.service - ZoneMinder CCTV recording and surveillance system
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/zoneminder.service; enabled)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sat 2016-10-22 10:25:56 CEST; 5s ago
  Process: 13117 ExecStart=/usr/bin/zmpkg.pl start (code=exited, status=255)

Oct 22 10:25:56 XXXXX zmpkg.pl[13117]: Can't open config file '/etc/zm/zm.conf': Permission denied at /usr/share/perl5/ZoneMinder/Config.pm line 119.

I assume you followed a set of instructions on wiki.zoneminder.com.
Our wiki is managed solely by community. If you spot a problem, then I would encourage you to fix it. If you aren't sure, then look at the history and contact the original author of the guide and work it out with him or her.

Note that this particular problem is actually a packaging issue. The package should have set the right permissions during installation. Another, probably better approach, might be to determine who the package manager is for the package you used and let him or her know about it.

[krdoor]

I only have 1 ip camera, so I don't think I will overload my raspberry pi3 system, its only running zm and an openvpn server, and is used rarely as media player.

I did follow this guid: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Debian_8_64 ... e_Easy_Way

Meanwhile I saw on: http://zoneminder.readthedocs.io/en/sta ... ian-jessie that I also could also have fixed that issue via: chgrp -c www-data /etc/zm/zm.conf

good point about notifying the package manager, I think found the Package Manager it in the docs:

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zoneminder (1.29.0+dfsg-1~bpo8+1) jessie-backports; urgency=medium

  * Rebuild for jessie-backports.
  * Use bundled copy of CakePHP; do not `dh_linktree` system one.

 -- Dmitry Smirnov <onlyjob@debian.org>  Sun, 21 Feb 2016 13:21:24 +1100

I will drop Dmitry an email, but not sure this is a valid real existing email

Krdoor

[knight-of-ni]

Yes, that's him. Onlyjob is one of the official Debian package maintainers.

That jogged my memory. Seems this issue was reported and labelled as fixed back in 2015:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo ... bug=789327

I did not read the whole thing so perhaps I missed something but the reporter identifies the cause as incorrect permissions on zm.conf. Strange it still is not fixed. That's about as far as I can take it, as I'm a Redhat user and don't use Debian distros, even on my raspberry pi's.