ZoneMinder Forums

Buckle up, there's a lotta background:

1) Played with the melin 1.22 liveCD, had fun, learned how to get things working in Zoneminder. Moved onto the ZM 2008 which worked over pclinuxPS, loved it, especially the gapless events view.
2) Found a killer deal on a Q6600 from Dell. Old POS was an Athlon1400; quite the upgrade, had to do it.
3) Surprise! ZM liveCDs don't work because of the ICH9 southbridge. With and without the "-enable-all-ide" option, and ide/sata/raid bios setting in all possible combinations. I frankensteined an old PCI PATA controller into the box because of the SATA difficulties - I was able to install to PATA but unable to migrate PATA>SATA, nor was I able to mkLiveCD from the system menu - frustratingly close, as the SATA drive was mountable, just not as boot drive, or at boot time, or at grub loader, I dunno which
3b) Tried every distro around, couldn't find the right distro that worked on the hardware (Mandriva 2009 maybe, and Dell's own tweaked ubuntu 8.04 were pretty much it without requiring frankendrive), didn't crap out of installation, and had zm available in a package. Other fails were arch, dsl, knoppix, pclinuxos, debian, Fedora 10, gentoo, machboot, yoper...
4) Final configuration is Dell's 8.04, synaptic-ed old 1.22 deb. Troubleshot and set up for two weeks, and then I emptied my events from the db and harddrive. I remastersys'ed so that I could attempt an upgrade to the wonderful gapless events version (1.23). Didn't know at the time that it was only available through the "replay" options, and hence, possibly available in 1.22 - haven't gone back to take a look, and a moot point, regardless. The upgrade seemed to be the standard procedure of stopping zoneminder, using the gutsy debs at the northernridge.com ftp server, upgrade the db, reset permissions, restart zoneminder and rock n roll.
5) Everything seemed to have gone fine, but I noticed that my events are not viewable. The web interface will count events up, all the cameras work, montage is smooth, blablabla. But I click on an event, and get only the image placeholder and the little broken image icon. Periodically, the events in the web interface get wiped out and then continue to count up before getting wiped again.

My guess is that zm doesn't have authority to write to the disk. The counting up I'm seeing is in the mysql db, but zmaudit wipes those when it can't find the files in the events directory (which at all times is empty, I've checked).

What do I do?

1) downgrade to my remastersys'ed image and wait a year for broad, standardized ICH9 support?
2) change the one little setting that I can't find (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)?
3) try installing from source on Mandriva2009 (wasn't an option early on, but after step 4 and all the reading I've been doing, I feel capable)?
4) go back to the old POS computer and turn the q6600 into gamer's paradise?

Great forum.

***** EDITED for brevity, and changed mandriva from fedora, re-remembered some middle steps regarding frankendrive

Unfortunately without some errors that detail what is going on the most I can do is agree that obviously files are not being written to disk and zmaudit is doing it's job very well.

Check your web root and make sure the events directory or symlink exists.
Make sure ZM is running as the same user/group as Apache.
ZM_PATH_EVENTS is referenced from web root so it should be just the folder/symlink name ie "events" and not the path from your drive root.
And of course make sure the events folder is accessible by the Apache user.

Thanks, but I've downgraded. The remastersys image didn't work, and I had to do a ground up install. Once I've got a foolproof imaging solution, I'll be willing to experiment with bricking my computer again. Perhaps a month or so? I'd really like to contribute to the community by solving a problem for you guys.

Your problem sounds very similar to something that I pulled my hair out with for 2 weeks.

In the end I found the error was the syntax that I used for the events directory under the options tab under paths.

In input /events as my directory which does not work and all the logs output is that ZM can't write to /events directory which didn't trigger my brain to see the problem.

After checking all permissions, testing that I could open the folder directly from my web browser I figured out that you must input the directory name without the preceding /.

example; events
NOT /events

Cheers,

Paul