ZoneMinder Forums

Hi,

I have been successful in creating a crazy setup for my to-be Zoneminder environment...
Well, to be more exact, knew about ZM for a long time, but decided now to install it on an existing infrastructure which may not be exactly suitable.

The situation is as follows :
I have a cluster made up of Server A (which is the faster one), and server B (which is slower, but more robust. A real server).
Server A is the active one in the cluster, B is the standby node.
Server A is the node where MySQL and Apache are running, so it would be wise to install ZM on this node as well. Server B, however, is situated in a place in my home where the cameras can be easily connected to the DVR card which (for that reason) is installed in server B.
Now I have a problem, and I'm not to sure what to do next.

I can try to get ZM running on server B, and use mod_proxy to go from the running Apache instance on server A to ZM on server B. This poses the problem on how to get the ZM to work with a remote MySQL DB.
I believe this is possible, but will I be able to see live pictures as well ?

Second solution could be to have ZM running on server A as well, but then I would have to be able to read the /dev/videoX files from server B over the network. I have seen some posts about this on the internet, but nothing I could understand...

So, my two questions are :
Does solution 1 work for live streaming as well ?
Is it possible to remote read the /dev/videoX 's from within ZM ?

I know my setup is probably not the smartest one, but I'm more or less bound to physical restrictions on where to place the servers.
Hope someone can help out a little.

Thanks,
Hans

I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to achieve.

Since you are using a local capture card for your cameras, rather than IP cameras, you really can't have a truly redundant system. The server with the capture card will always be a single point of failure.

For example, you could run zoneminder on both server A & B. Program server B normally since that has the capture card. For Server A, you would program each camera as a Remote Zoneminder device (To answer your question - it's one of the camera presets you can choose from).

However, that doesn't get you anything. If server B fails then server A stops recording, which defeats the purpose.

If your goal in this is to have a fully redundant system, I would do the following:
1) git rid of the cluster (not needed unless you absolutely have to have a single virtual ip that points to the active node)
2) Add enough ip video encoders to support all your analog cameras
3) program two recorders to independently view & record from the video encoders. Nearly all ip devices support multiple streams these days.

Hi, Knnniggett,
Thanks for replying.

I'm sorry. Should have explained better. I'm not trying to get ZM redundant. The reason I have a cluster is for other software (like email collaboration software).
I'm perfectly happy if the server running ZM goes down, als long als the other applications keep running.

I did make a little progress using proxypass settings to tunnel zm http through the redundant apache (the one that fails over in case of a problem).

I do get the start page of ZM, but no live feed. Logs reveal that cgi-bin is not found, or proxypass for cgi-bin doesn't work properly.

Does this help you formulate another answer to my questions ?

Thanks,
Hans

Yeah, ok.
Now I understand the need to for complications with apache.

I haven't done this in years, but here is what I did to reverse proxy mythtv into my web server: So your configuration on Server A might look something like this: So maybe the only thing missing is the ProxyPassReverse directive form your previous attempt?

Hm,

Tried those settings, but they don't work for some reason.

Will open a new question with specifics for my situation.
Thanks for thinking with me.