ZoneMinder Forums

So I am new to Zoneminder. I am currently running 1.32.3 on Centos 7 inside of a Vmware VM. I am basically doing a small POC. I set up zoneminder and one camera successfully and was working at adjusting zones and motion detection. For some reason I decided to reboot the machine. After the reboot it cannot couldn't to the camera stream with a permission denied complaint:

Unable to open input rtsp://onvifusername:Onvifpassword@192.168.150.19/onvif-media/media.amp?profile=profile_1_h264&sessiontimeout=60&streamtype=unicast due to: Permission denied zm_ffmpeg_camera.cpp 357
2019-10-18 10:38:33 zmc_m1 6428 ERR Failed to prime capture of initial monitor zmc.cpp 253
2019-10-18 10:38:23 zmc_m1 6428 ERR Failed to prime capture of initial monitor zmc.cpp 253
2019-10-18 10:38:23 zmc_m1 6428 ERR Unable to open input rtsp://onvifusername:onvifpassword@192.168.150.19/onvif-media/media.amp?profile=profile_1_h264&sessiontimeout=60&streamtype=unicast due to: Permission denied

In trying to solve this problem I confirmed that I was able to connect to the camera stream using VLC at the same url and ONVIF user credentials. Also deleting and re-adding camera the did not resolve the issue.

So, being unable to solve the problem I bailed and deleted that VM and restarted from scratch. Got everything working again and then the other day we we had a storm and a power failure. The UPS ran down and the esxi host went down. Evert hing restarted cleanly but I have the same situation with the camera. Zoneminder cannot connect to the stream

So now I am am stuck. Have searched a fair bit and haven't found anything about this issue so I figure it's either so simple that no one makes this mistake or super unusual. Of course if more info is required just say the word I am happy to oblige.

In an effort to further troubleshoot this issue I ran a packet capture on the zoneminder machine. My intention was to compare it to a capture from another machine that was successfully connecting to the camera stream using VLC. Unfortunately that didn't help much because the ZoneMinder machine never attempts to communicate with the camera, or anything else for that matter (the exception being a connection to an ntp server to sync time).

So now I am even more baffled than before.

So this was a big Doh! The fact that Zoneminder wasn't communicating with the camera at all told me that the permission issue was in the Zoneminder system not with Zoneminder conencting to the camera.

I had not permanently disabled SeLinux. So after the first reboot it was re-enabled as Zoneminder had file access issues. Edited /etc/selinux/config to disable it permanently, rebooted and all was right with the world.