ZoneMinder Forums

ZM is flooding my /var/log/messages with what seems to be routine stuf such as:
Zoneminder is running on a home server that handles stuff other than just monitoring the camera so I need to see the system messages in the system log for maintenance purposes.

Short of editing the syslog.conf, is there and option to only allow Zoneminder to log certain things like errors and disregard the routine stuff? I don’t mind a limited amount of errors getting directed to the syslog if absolutely necessary but I don’t need the routine stuff filling the logs. Ideally, Zoneminder would only log the important stuff to a separate log file that could be reviewed separately to problem-shoot why something isn’t working. I don’t need to know every time it processes something on a particular camera – that’s why there is an event log on the GUI.

I agree with you. an option to hide these messages would greatly help.

There is a way to detour those messages to another log file... like /var/log/zm/zm.log

http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/Documentation goto Logging... follow instructions...

whatboy wrote:There is a way to detour those messages to another log file... like /var/log/zm/zm.log

http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/Documentation goto Logging... follow instructions...

yes I read it...

the wiki states:

In order to control syslog messages you need to locate and edit the syslog.conf file on your system. This will often be in the /etc directory

I asked for a way without editing the syslog.conf file. I'm not certain why it pushes logs to the system log file. At most, it should only publish error messages (and only critical error messages at that) and everything else should be logged to the /tmp folder or the log file specified in the options. Since there appears to be no other way, I will have to default and edit the syslog.conf but it just seems unnecessary.

Thanks for you help,

There are a couple of workarounds you can use. You can edit the FPS Report Interval in the monitor settings Misc tab and set it to a huge value. Or you can reduce the default debug level in the binaries by looking for the zmDbgInit call in zmc.cpp, zma.cpp and changing the debug level to -1 and then recompile and reinstall etc.

I have added a mod to 1.24.3 to allow these messages to be disabled by setting the FPS Report Interval to zero.

zoneminder wrote:I have added a mod to 1.24.3 to allow these messages to be disabled by setting the FPS Report Interval to zero.

Thanks, I apperciate your help. this should help when .3 is offically released. In the mean time, I'll edit the syslog.conf or continue to filter out the ZM stuff with a bash script I wrote.