ZoneMinder Forums

Hi, I'm doing my first ZM installation. It will be used to monitor the warehouse and client area of a local retailer. The idea is to see that employees don't put things in their pockets when are alone in the warehouse and to monitor the client area, just to overview how it goes.

The place: Everything is in one building. The warehouse is rather big: two full floors, long corridors, shelves full of little things. The client area is large also, but we want some panoramic views there only.

The cameras: We planned 30 cameras. They will be all analog because they are cheaper and the wiring/cabling is not a problem (just one building as I said, easy access and cable trays everywhere). Question:
- Is my rationale sound?

Now the server: I installed ZM on a Debian Unstable box: AMD64 dual 3.4 GHz, 2 Gigs of RAM, 400 GB of storage. Questions:
- Will this box be enough? Is CPU OK? Is mem OK? In the warehouse there's very little probability of having many cameras active at the same time.
- An HD of 400 GB is reasonable? I plan to have a cron job to backup and delete the events to DVD periodically. How much can I expect those 400 GB last?

The capture cards: Until now I just bought a PV-143 card, a camera and a few lenses and saw that everything works. For the actual installation we will need two 16 channel cards, but I don't know what to buy: will two PV-155 be enough or should I want two PV-183? Will the extra frames make any difference in my use case? Should I look better look for cards from another vendor?

Well, that's all I can see until now...
Any advice will be appreciated!

TIA
Mario

Hi, no comment?

Am I doing everything OK?
What about the card? PV-155 or PV-183?

Thanks...
Mario

I have a few large boxes out there. However, one 24 camera system is having issues with database connections, and seems overloaded. So I would throw as much system as it as I could. To start...

Chipset
There are a lot of problems with non-intel chipsets and capture cards. Yes some work, but I have personally had issues too many times to every try it again.

Memory
Memory is cheap. There is no reason not to fill it. If you ever touch the swap, watch your load skyrocket.

Hard Drive
A 500 gig drive in you case should be about a week. This will vary depending on how much motion you have and how much you capture. Right now 500 gig drives and 750 gig drives are at the sweet spot in the price point. And the backups to DVD, unless filtered for specific content, will be a lot more trouble than you think. About 100 DVDs a week...

Cards
I have a few of both. The 183 captures faster. It also only shares the chip once, so a weird config issue can only take out one other camera... It is more expensive... Get heat sinks. Seriously.

Hi, Lee. Thanks for your comments!

Mario

I've got a single 183 card with only 12 cameras on it so far, and it works like a charm.
Lee is right on there about chip sharing; I could not imagine chasing settings across 4 cams on a chip.
I keep the framerates low, in the 2~5 FPS range.
The place is very busy24/7/365, with over 200,000 events recorded in one month. I get about 5 weeks on my 500Gb storage, that's with a 640x480 IP cam and a 1280 x 960 megapixel cam thrown in as well.

Lee Sharp wrote: Hard Drive
A 500 gig drive in you case should be about a week. This will vary depending on how much motion you have and how much you capture. Right now 500 gig drives and 750 gig drives are at the sweet spot in the price point. And the backups to DVD, unless filtered for specific content, will be a lot more trouble than you think. About 100 DVDs a week...

Agreed.

Please don't rely on backing up to DVDs unless you really know what you're doing. In general, the more automated a backup, the less likely it is to fail. Burning data to disc requires someone to physically swap discs out of a DVD burner. People make mistakes, and people will mess up the order and whatnot of the burnt discs. It also requires someone's time whereas other solutions don't. Also, it's terribly inefficient. Buying spare drives and even some external JBOD or RAID controllers is the hassle-free option for the long term. It also makes retrieving data from backups easier.

You're much better off buying another 500 GB drive and backing up to that. It can be in the same server or on a backup server on the network. Also, you don't want to backup ALL the events ZM generates due to high volume. As others have suggested, a filter is preferable.

I've heard too many horror stories of people relying on DVD backups. Don't become one of them.

The ONE case where it makes sense to backup to DVD is when you want to preserve something for the long haul. For example, you recorded an employee committing theft. In that case the video should be taken off of magnetic media and onto optical. Hard drives fail. An archival quality DVD backup will be your better option. You'd also want to get that evidence off your systems and somewhere secure (offsite + in a safe).

I myself am experimenting with Amazon S3 for ZM's backups. S3 is an online backup solution. For very specific events I backup offsite to either S3 or to a public facing backup server I run. Because online backups are much slower, there's a limiting factor to what you can backup. I generally reserve it for the most important few events each week.