ZoneMinder - state-of-the-art video surveillance software system

[timconsidine]

@humptydumpty I’ve been ill last 3 months so not really any progress, sorry. Slowly improving, so I will try to pick it up again.
Would like it for my own deployment so have not abandoned it

[humptydumpty]

@timconsidine Ah, same here although not as long as you. I hope you feel better. I thought I'd tackle some of the things that were on the backburner during the holidays but nope, life has other plans indeed

[timconsidine]

I'm picking Zoneminder back up today to try to overcome the last packaging issues.

[timconsidine]

whoop whoop
@humptydumpty Resolved the deployment issues

Got a camera working
After struggling with firewall config/networking, I have even got Zoneminder ("ZM") running on my Cloudron VPS (in cloud naturally) but viewing a camera installed at the office behind the firewall.

More testing and config exploration needed : I am no ZM expert.

Be prepared for head-scratching on camera configs if you don't know them.

Be ready to deal with ZM filling your cloudron free disk space, and ensuring you prevent that, not just recover from it.

Git repo : https://git.cloudron.io/timconsidine/cloudron-zoneminder
Docker image : tcmbp132021/cloudron-zoneminder:v2.0.4 (being uploaded)
Custom app installer ccai.appx.uk updated

Last deployment had an ALPHA warning. This is now well above BETA, maybe even a release candidate.

[humptydumpty]

@timconsidine said in ZoneMinder - state-of-the-art video surveillance software system:

Be ready to deal with ZM filling your cloudron free disk space, and ensuring you prevent that, not just recover from it.

Congrats on the breakthrough! Currently, I'm using BlueIris (Windows based app) and it also has too many options. IIRC, it took me a full working day to get it set up properly. As for backups and disk space, I'm definitely not ready for that yet. I'll need to add a new backup destination to an external drive to replace my S3 BackBlaze since it fails to upload almost every other day. Speaking of local storage, I wonder if I can add more than one and have one dedicated to ZM so it doesn't kill the server.

[timconsidine]

@humptydumpty I have some notes that I put in QUICKSTART.md in /app/code.

It's not a complete guide, just a quick start for basic config. But it does have some links to other proper guides.

Storage : yep, I need to make a strategy. Currently my cameras back up via their NVR to a large Hetzner Storage Box. I am thinking to add some scripts to do similar, automatically moving ZM files off to Hetzner Storage Box based on time or size. And first step, find out what ZM provides to manage all this.

Will update on my approach/experience as it builds.

[timconsidine]

Once you have one camera working, it is easy to clone and adjust settings.

screenshot shrunk for forum upload max image size

[humptydumpty]

Is the disk space filling up because you’re recording 24/7 or is it a ZM misconfiguration thing?

[timconsidine]

@humptydumpty errr, I'm surprised it is not filling up more !

root@cac0ee46-aded-4b89-9498-d0c84f06018d:/# du -hs /app/data
1002M   /app/data

I have left it running overnight with 2 cameras and added 2 more this morning.

I need to check what is actually being recorded, and whether it is configured correctly.
It may just be in Monitor mode - displaying feed but not saving.

[timconsidine]

update on disk used
it's definitely recording (can do playback on a camera)

Now has 5 cameras using 'Modect' (motion detect / record)

Terminal shows :

root@cac0ee46-aded-4b89-9498-d0c84f06018d:/# du -sh /app/data
2.0G    /app/data

so ~1Gb increase in 4 hours but it's an office so quite busy coming and going

ZM browser shows 472 events using 1.77Gb

[humptydumpty]

@timconsidine Not bad! What cams/resolution you running?