ZoneMinder Forums

Good day all.

As per the topic title I am looking for advice and tips with regards to upgrading ZoneMinder on a remote installation.

The current set-up is running Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS and ZoneMinder 1.25.0, and we are looking at upgrading to the current version of ZoneMinder.
We have full user, admin, and root access to the server via SSH, but we do not have physical access to the server it's self.

Can you please advice what would be the best and safest way to upgrade ZoneMinder to the latest version on this server.

Thanks for your time.

Best Regards.

I always use webmin
you can download a .deb of the latest available
put it onto the ZM and install as any regular .deb
you can do all the system upgrades remotely with the webmin gui
i.e. system upgrades, package upgrades and maintain any other things you have got on ZM
and that nice mr/mrs/miss occonor has provided a repository to make life easy us ZMers....,
(thanks again to "o")

Ah, Webmin is not a good option to install ZM remotely. You can upgrade your ZM by adding the PPA repository and doing an upgrade.
See: http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.ph ... e_easy_way

This is for an install but it will give you an idea how to get the PPA installed to do an upgrade. All can be done using SSH and Putty in Windows or other viewer. I manage a server 30 miles away without any issues. Be advised, though, that I had some issues with a fresh install of 12.04-5 in that it would not allow me to install the files to add the PPA. As an option you can download the 1.27 .deb file and install it locally. You would, however, be most successful to completely remove the existing ZM and install 1.27 afresh (I had some issues a while back with missing files doing an upgrade).
Will be glad to write mor for you if needed.

bb

Just to see if I could do it I set up a Ubuntu 12.04-3 server and upgraded it to 12.04-5. Then I set up Zoneminder 1.25.0 following this:
http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.ph ... e_easy_way
I configured a USB camera and made sure it worked. Then I upgraded to 1.27 as follows:

Become root:
sudo su

Install PPA Repository for Zoneminder 1.27

apt-get install python-software-properties

add-apt-repository ppa:iconnor/zoneminder

apt-get update

Run distribution upgrade

apt-get dist-upgrade

Note: I recommend you replace the version of the Zoneminder config with the package maintainers version and upgrade the database to InnoDB

Install "extra" VLC components to make libvlc work

apt-get install libvlc-dev libvlccore-dev vlc

Add back the delay to allow MySQL to start before Zoneminder

nano /etc/init.d/zoneminder

Add above "zmfix -a" sleep 15

should look like:

start() {
sleep 15
echo -n "Starting $prog: "


Ctrl+o Enter to save

CTRL+x to exit

A couple of things to check after the upgrade:

In the monitor configuration set the Reference Image Blend %age and the Alarm Reference Image Blend %age each to 6.25% for starters. Otherwise your cameras could go into alarm forever!
Check the other Monitor/Source settings. My USB camera ended up in greyscale and I need to change other settings to get the camera to work best. I also added a remote camera to work with Libvlc.

Oh... all of this was done with an OpenSSH connection to the server using Putty from a Windows 8.1 PC...

Everything on this box with this procedure seems to work! Yeah!!!

Now, if you want to go back and add the "master" PPA repository and get the latest ZM "Snapshot" (yes, I tried it and it works!)

add-apt-repository ppa:iconnor/zoneminder-master

apt-get update

apt-get upgrade

Good Luck!!!

Thank you for your time and replies.

I am happy to say that the upgrade went smoothly and now running ZoneMinder 1.27.99.0

Everything seems to be working as it was, and the system is now ready for the new IP cameras to be added.

Thanks again.