ZoneMinder Forums

I apologize as this will be a little bit ranty...

So I've just migrated away from iSpy which I was running on Win 2008R2. My plan was simple
Run proxmox on my homeserver and run Zoneminder inside of an LXC container. Record to another LXC container which has my storage (I have other things stored here, such as my films and backups, hence the separation)
Nope. not going to work. From what I can see, ZM doesn't like containers.
Sure, some software doesn't and I can accept that. I'll just give ZM a full Ubuntu install instead of a container.
Right now I'm trying to get it to record to a network location. This apparently is a big ask and just seems waaaay overly complex compared to the ease of setup that was iSpy.
I just feel like I'm having to jump through way to many hoops to get this software working.
Apparently, zoneminder is the best open source CCTV software out there, but it's just so unwieldy to setup.

Why can't I just mount the network location in fstab and say 'record to here' ?
because the below link is just hell
https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Common_Issu ... ive_or_NAS

/rant

In all seriousness, is there going to be an effort to modernize and simplify the setup process?
And if I'm wrong about my rant, can you point me to a nicer guide?

Well for starters you are using an LXC container, which is a less popular, less documented path. I'm sure it's possible. I've seen others mention LXC containers in passing, but I don't think I've seen someone write a howto or easy-way guide. It would be be nice if you were the one to document a procedure if you choose to stick with it.

Have you seen our dockerfiles??
https://github.com/ZoneMinder/zmdockerfiles

If you follow that link, you can see that the docker solution has received some love and might go smoother for you.

As for the dedicated drive link you posted, you're in luck. That guide will be obsolete after the next release. Since you are posting in the 1.31.x forum, I assume you are attempting to run from our master branch (or one of iconnor's branches), which means, right this very moment, you can set ZM_DIR_EVENTS and ZM_DIR_IMAGES to whatever absolute path you want. The hoops you had to jump through previously are no longer necessary. Documentation for this will follow with the next release.

I'm a bit curious. You decided to go from a Windows solution to one that is pure Linux. What didn't you like about iSpy?

External storage for Ubuntu/Zoneminder for the current release is best done with systemd mount. See the WIKI for all you need to know for installing Zoneminder on Ubuntu: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Ubuntu
Systemd mount instructions: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Common_Issu ... ive_or_NAS but keep in mind the other or external drive needs to have a format that Linux symbolic links will work on.

bbunge wrote: ↑Sat Mar 03, 2018 2:47 am External storage for Ubuntu/Zoneminder for the current release is best done with systemd mount. See the WIKI for all you need to know for installing Zoneminder on Ubuntu: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Ubuntu
Systemd mount instructions: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Common_Issu ... ive_or_NAS but keep in mind the other or external drive needs to have a format that Linux symbolic links will work on.

There are some things you can't do inside a container, and getting access to systemd is one of them, since it is not running in the container.

Docker has a feature called Volumes one can enable to write external data. The steps to set that up for our docker files are saved as comments at the bottom of the file. I'm guessing LXC has a feature like that too, but I've never used LXC so don't know for sure.

LXC is baked into Proxmox. seemed a bit daft to hypervisor>VM>docker.
I'm now trying out a competitor that gets word substituted to shinobi instead of ZM due to it being a bit more modern in tech (edited by admin: Not because it claims to be more modern in tech, but because Moe, the author of Shinobi is a regular spammer, faking IDs in ZM forums posting about his software).
I've used Docker briefly at work but I'm not overly familiar with it. LXC to me leans closer to a traditional VM compared to docker which I prefer.

with regards to moving away from iSpy, it was more about moving away from Win server 2008R2. iSpy was okay but not the easiest to work with if you wanted to access remotely. You had to access it through their website even if you're within the local network which was a bit strange.