ZoneMinder Forums

Blimey. I hope that is the answer after all the hoops you've been through.

Dontcha just love computers?

Well, the machine was working 100% today, so I disconnected it and took it out to the remote site where it belongs. I connected it, booted it up, and BAM! Froze. After much swearing and experimentation, I discovered that it will boot fine and ZoneMinder will start successfully, but ONLY if no cameras are connected to the capture card. It's got a Spectra-8 capture card in, the same as the rest of my ZM machines, only this one alone is running a 2.6 kernel (2.6.13). If no cameras are connected, the system records blank events (blue screen) without problems.

I'm still at the remote site and am going to see what happens if I connect the cameras AFTER zoneminder is running. It'd be a temporary solution at best (if it even works), but I'm going on vacation and don't want to leave without coverage.

Any ideas, other than to replace the capture card?

I still don't understand why it'll work fine without cameras and record a blue screen. I would think that the system wouldn't care if there was an image coming in or not - it'd do just as it's doing now and record blue (no signal) instead of the camera feed.

And just why in the heck did removing the battery fix this same problem when on my desk and it's back out here?!? If there was a problem with the capture card, I'd think that it wouldn't work without cameras either. Logical?

The *instant* I connect a single camera to the machine while zoneminder is running, everything freezes. I'm going to try xawtv to see if that does the same. If it does, I'll re-seat the capture card. Man this is weird!

And xawtv works fine, both on the primary inputs and on the expansion board... What the hell is going on with this thing?!???

OK, started zoneminder, set all monitors to monitor only, then connected a camera. It worked without freezing up. What does zoneminder do differently when it records than when viewing only???

I spoke too soon - it worked for a few minutes with all monitors set to monitor instead of record, then froze.

what if you disable all but 1 input and run zm, perhaps its the way it switches the inputs if xawtv is ok

ZM does nothing differently when recording than just monitoring. However it does do different things that xawtv et al. TV type programs just map through the video memory onto screen memory and then it's just fed through. Anything that needs to inspect the images (e.g. ZM) needs to do frame grabbing. I suspect something to do with this is causing your problem.

You can get xawtv to do frame grabs, though off the top of my head I can't remember the command, so perhaps you can try doing a few with that and seeing if it does the same, though it might be hard to reproduce the amount of grabs.

The other possibility I can thing of is perhaps an issue with the PCI bus and or memory on your machine. If you are having bandwidth issues on the bus, then heavy usage might show this up if your bus is a bit dicky but usually random lockups are memory related, or occasionally interrupts but if you only have one card in there then I would not expect that to be a problem.

Sorry I can't be more helpful. I've been wrestling with PTZ cams that spontaneously decide to start and stop working at random so I feel your pain

Welp, I brought it back to my office with me. I think I'm going to replace the motherboard and see what happens. (Probably reinstall the system as well - both the file system and database have crashed more than I care to think about over this process, plus I can't revert back to the 2.4 kernel.) This is probably going to have to wait until I get back from vacation though.

Hopefully this process will fix the problems - I'll report back. Thanks for the ideas guys.

The only time i have seen this ie the freezing when connecting a cam was when i was playing with a cheapy pchips board with built in processor and it did that and i couldnt stop it. Zm worked fine as long as it wasnt on the local cams, (ie other zm or ip cams were great) I had to change the mobo and a tried a sis chipset which has been fine