Zoneminder(HOW TO)

About

ZoneMinder is intended for use in single or multi-camera video security applications, including commercial or home CCTV, theft prevention and child, family member or home monitoring and other domestic care scenarios such as nanny cam installations. It supports capture, analysis, recording, and monitoring of video data coming from one or more video or network cameras attached to a Linux system. ZoneMinder also support web and semi-automatic control of Pan/Tilt/Zoom cameras using a variety of protocols. It is suitable for use as a DIY home video security system and for commercial or professional video security and surveillance. It can also be integrated into a home automation system via X.10 or other protocols.

	Note:
	Zoneminder is available as a contribs, but that is a very old one for SME server 7. Today, Zoneminder has it's own easy repository, and hopefully these instructions can be turned into a new updated contrib. For now, this how-to is intended to be used with IP camera's only.

Installation

Requirements

PHP 5.6 is required for a fully functional Zoneminder and its API's installation. Since Koozali SME Server 8.x and 9.x come with a lower version of PHP, one must install the PHP Software Collections first.

Zoneminder is available from the Zoneminder repository. You need to configure the zmrepo as explained here.

Install Zoneminder from the zmrepo

yum install zoneminder --enablerepo=zmrepo

Zoneminder's configuration file is located at /etc/zm.conf. Not really known if it is required, but you can change the Apache user in the zm.conf file from apache:apache to www:www, and double check the database credentials in the same file with the ones you have used.

MySQL database

Zoneminder works 'best' with InnodeDB enabled. As root issue:

db configuration setprop mysqld InnoDB enabled
expand-template /etc/my.cnf
sv t /service/mysqld

Zoneminder uses MySQL for the storage of picture data, so we need to create a new database. As root issue:

mysql
create database zm;
grant all privileges on zm.* to zmuser identified by 'zmpass';
flush privileges;
exit

Then we populate the new database:

mysql zm < /usr/share/zoneminder/db/zm_create.sql

The above bold credentials should be replaced by your own information.

	Note:
	Once somebody starts creating a contrib, the above credentials should be in a db key e.g. zoneminder and DBUser, DBPass, so the configuration files will be templated and auto generated by an event

Create custom templates

mkdir -p /etc/e-smith/templates-custom/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf/
cp /etc/httpd/conf.d/zoneminder.conf /etc/e-smith/templates-custom/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf/98zoneminder
rm -f /etc/httpd/conf.d/zoneminder.conf
sed -i "18i AddType application/x-httpd-php .php" /etc/e-smith/templates-custom/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf/98zoneminder
sed -i "19i AuthBasicProvider external" /etc/e-smith/templates-custom/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf/98zoneminder 
sed --in-place '/DELETE/d' /etc/e-smith/templates-custom/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf/98zoneminder
expand-template /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
service httpd-e-smith restart

	Note:
	Please note that the above templates do not implement any authentication to access the Zoneminder portal (webinterface). Options could be specific users (e.g. admin) or all valid SME users.

Start Zoneminder at boot

config set zoneminder service status enabled 
ln -s /etc/rc.d/init.d/e-smith-service /etc/rc7.d/S98zoneminder

The mysqlinit (init-default-databases) process (which starts after the zoneminder service) will have MySQL restarted whilst Zoneminder is actively using it. The Zoneminder service will not start for due to this running process. To prevent Zoneminder to start too quickly we delay the Zoneminder service to start a bit later by adding a sleep command in the script /etc/rc.d/init.d/zoneminder.

In /etc/rc.d/init.d/zoneminder where is says:

start()
{
(rest of the code)

make it:

start()
{
sleep 10
(rest of the code)

You can now start Zoneminder manually:

service zoneminder start

And access the Zoneminder portal at http://yourserver.com/zm, and login as admin admin

Acces Zoneminder via sub domain

Instead of accessing the Zoneminder portal at http://myserver.com/zm, it is possible to change this to e.g. https://cctv.myserver.com. For this the easiest and comfortable way is to use the webapps-common contrib.

	Note:
	This part assumes you have followed the complete above installation procedure.

Install the webapps-common contrib according to the how-to. Then (as per example for https://cctv.myserver.com) issue the following as root:

db domains set cctv.myserver.com domain Description "CCTV" Content Primary \
Nameservers internet TemplatePath WebAppVirtualHost \
DocumentRoot /usr/share/zoneminder/www RequireSSL enabled
signal-event domain-create cctv.myserver.com

Next you need to adjust the existing (from above) custom template (make a backup copy first):

sed --in-place '/Alias/d' /etc/e-smith/templates-custom/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf/98zoneminder

Followed by:

signal-event webapps-update

to activate all changes. Now you can reach your zoneminder portal at https://cctv.myserver.com

Uninstall

To uninstall Zoneminder and all it's dependencies, we will use the yum history to uninstall all dependencies that came with the initial installation, but are no longer required as we remove Zoneminder. Stop Zoneminder:

service zoneminder stop

First we need to check the yum transaction ID that installed Zoneminder. As root issue:

yum history package-info zoneminder

the result is all yum knows about the Zoneminder package. We are interested in the Transaction ID. Next we uninstall Zoneminder and all it's dependencies based on the number of the Transaction ID:

yum history undo Transaction ID number

and confirm the uninstallation of Zoneminder and all dependencies.

	Note:
	The removal of the Zoneminder RPM will fail due to a dependency on SELinux which SME Server does not use. An additional command is required to uninstall the Zoneminder RPM. To ensure proper removal of all dependencies, only the Zoneminder RPM will be removed without executing the uninstall scripts included in the RPM.

yum --setopt=tsflags=noscripts remove zoneminder

Then we need to remove the custom template, the symlink that we created to start Zoneminder at boot and the subdomain that we may have created:

rm -f /etc/e-smith/templates-custom/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf/98zoneminder
rm -f /etc/rc7.d/S98zoneminder
signal-event domain-delete cctv.myserver.com
signal-event webapps-update

Now to cleanup everything you may want to perform the usual post-upgrade and reboot events. All that is left is the MySQL database zm and the logfiles. It's up to you what to do with them.

ZoneMinder clients

By default, ZoneMinder can be accessed via the webinterface. There are also 3rd party client applications available.

zmNinja, a beautiful fast and efficient client application (freely available on Github) DEMO

- Android - Play Store

- iOS - iTunes

- Mac/Windows/Linux Github