I'm relatively new to linux and zoneminder so please bear with me.
I'm running zoneminder V1.33.14 on my own Kubuntu 18.04 server. Initial installation consisted of fresh install of Kubuntu and Zoneminder. Have 5 camera definitions and initially all was working well. I was able to see all cameras and events were recorded. I was also able to access my Zoneminder setup remotely using ZMNinja on my android phone. Then one day all my camera definitions disappeared from the system. I don't think I accidently deleated them but I did reqularly manually delete all events.
I reentered all my camera and associated zone definitions into the system and all cameras are again viewable. Web montage shows all cameras as does XMNinja. I've checked cake-error.log and error.log files in /var/logs/zm and no entries appear in either file. Older log files show entries that appear to have stopped about the time the camera definitions disappeared. When I force the alarm on the camera view web page for a camera defined as modect along with zones, this creates a forced event into the database which I can play back.
I reinstalled Zoneminder using Synaptic Package manager and it made no difference from what I can see.
My question are:
1. How and where can I tell if a motion detection alert is ever raised by Zoneminder? I would assume that Zoneminder analyzes the motion in the defined zone area and initiates the recording function, and
2. If the request to record is initialized (as per forcing the alarm), how does one verify that the recording function executed but possibly did not output anything?
Any other suggestions to solve my dilemma