ZM stopped triggering alarms?

[bearl]

Hello everyone,

We've been using ZoneMinder for a little over a week, and it's been great. The install went perfectly, and things were, of course, going entirely too well, so now we have to pay for that.

Friday afternoon, for a still undetermined reason, alarms stopped triggering. Let me say this up top here, if I manually trigger an alarm, everything gets recorded like normal, and all the database functions SEEM to be working okay related to recording the event.

We have two cameras, and both can be monitored, with a frame rate around 5fps. They are both set to Modect.

This is a SuSE Linux 9.1 system, and the only error I can find in the log files is the info below, but this error has been appearing in the logs since installation, and clearly events were triggering okay until Friday afternoon.

Starting pending process, zmfilter.pl
'zmfilter.pl' starting at 04/09/13 11:07:58, pid = 4814
'zmfilter.pl' started at 04/09/13 11:07:58
Can't locate MIME/Entity.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/i586-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/i586-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.3/i586-linux-thread-multi /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.3 /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl) at /usr/local/bin/zmfilter.pl line 87.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at /usr/local/bin/zmfilter.pl line 87.
'zmfilter.pl ' crashed at 04/09/13 11:07:58, exit status 2

We're still using the default "All" zones on both cameras.

If I list the zm related processes, I get the following info:

wwwrun 4495 1 0 10:57 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/perl -wT /usr/local/bin
/zmdc.pl status
wwwrun 4513 4495 39 10:57 ? 00:09:35 /usr/local/bin/zmc -m 1
wwwrun 4515 4495 0 10:57 ? 00:00:12 /usr/local/bin/zma -m 1
wwwrun 4520 4495 0 10:57 ? 00:00:09 /usr/local/bin/zma -m 2
wwwrun 4526 4495 0 10:57 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/perl -wT /usr/local/bin
/zmaudit.pl -d 900 -y
wwwrun 4530 4495 0 10:57 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/perl -wT /usr/local/bin
/zmwatch.pl
wwwrun 4541 3911 1 10:57 ? 00:00:15 /srv/www/cgi-bin/zms
wwwrun 4914 4495 49 11:12 ? 00:04:41 /usr/local/bin/zmc -m 2

"wwwrun" is the user that SuSE uses to run apache. As far as I can tell this user, and its group "daemon" have full permissions on all needed directories.

With that info, I'm obviously overlooking something, and would appreciate any help pointing me to what it could be.

Thanks very much!

Bill

[dougy]

not sure if this is the whole answer, but looks like the perl script cannot find the module it needs.

I had a similiar log message, about not being able to locate MIME:Entity.pm

grab the relevant packages from www.cpan.org and do a perl Makefile.pl; make; make install

That at least will get rid of the perl errors.

[zoneminder]

The perl errors are related to the zmfilter script not being able to find the modules it needs for sending emails etc. Even if you are using that I would recommend installing it as otherwise no filters will work.

The motion detect problem is curious. The only thing I can suggest at present is to 'kill -USR1' one or more of the zmc and/or zma processes. This increases the debug level and may give you a clue as to what is happening, especially when you try and trigger motion generated events.

Feel free to post the debug here if it's not obvious what it means.

Phil,

[bearl]

Thanks for the tips. I installed the perl-MIME-tools and perl-DateManip packages and now there are no perl errors in the log files. Now there are no errors in the log files at all, that I can determine are errors. Everything appears to be running okay, but it doesn't detect motion, or at least, doesn't trigger an alarm to start recording.

Phil, when I try a "kill -USR1 <pid>" for the zmc and zma processes they don't die. They seem to still be chugging along just fine. The shell prompt comes back with no feedback, and the processes still show in the process list, and "top" shows them still using around 70%

I've downloaded the LiveCD and I'm going to give that a try, just to see if there's some hardware or config issue that comes to light. But I'd like to try to solve this on the existing SuSE installation if possible, so any further tips to try to get more debugging info would be appreciated.

Thanks again,

Bill

[lazyleopard]

"kill -USR1 <pid>" turns on extra diagnostics. Your log files may grow rapidly. The information logged may help you to determine why you're not detecting any events.

[bearl]

Well, we're detecting motion and sounding alarms again, but I'm not sure why. I'm going to report what I did, in case it helps sometime in the future, but before I type this, let me just say that I know it's not going to make sense.

I shut down the zm processes, then renamed the "zm" directory under the web site, and did a new make / make install process to rebuild the program and recreate all the web directories from scratch. I didn't wipe the database, so when I started zm all the old settings were there. All worked well, but again, it didn't trigger alarms.

Here's what SEEMS to have solved it, though I can't see the connection:

Long term I want to store the events in a directory in a separate partition that's outside apache's reach. Yes, I know I can accomplish this with links, but for now I made the directory I want, changed the zm path setting to the new location, and restarted. Still no motion detection, but I *could* write images into the new location, but I couldn't review them (the events were recorded, but no images were visible when I played the events). I changed the path setting back to the default location, and events immediately started triggering.

At this point I can't even GUESS what might have been wrong that changing the path to an invalid location, then back to the original location got things working again, but they're working, and that's what matters.

I'm not sure what lessons to learn from all this, but if anyone has any moral to this story, I'd welcome it.

I'd be tempted to say "Don't fiddle with a working system," but as far as I can tell no one messed with it on Friday afternoon. I wasn't even HERE, so I'm pretty confident it wasn't me.

Thanks for all the suggestions, and Phil, thanks for a great program.

Bill