Vigilance system using ZoneMinder software for Arcoslab @ IEE, Universidad de Costa Rica.

What's it about?

As we well know there are several issues about security in Costa Rica. So it's always a good idea to have some way to “keep an eye” on our stuff or important places. Also there's tecnical importance onto knowing more about camera systems or any software developed in the philosophy of open software since it's an oportunity stay in contact with it and (why not?) try to help developing such tools or using it to develope another thing on our own.

The point is: ARCOSLAB need a vigilance system, ZonMinder provides solution (and a cheap one) to that. So what we intend here is to take maximum advantage of such a tool.

Main Objectives

Install ZoneMinder as a software of camera control and monitoring in the aim to have a system that detects events in the visual zone and send messages to warn about this events, as well to allow to the user access to the streaming of the event.

Specific objectives

Install and understand the software ZoneMinder for camera monitoring. Explore features, focusing on movement detection and warn messages. Explore the posibility of event clasiffication, via ZoneMinder or developing something for that.

Methodology

First thing to do is to install the software on a running debian device. In this case a pc with debian would be enough. Zoneminder is highly used around the world for sexurity systems, so we can hope there's easy way's to install. Actually there's a package in the official repositories for Debian and Linux for installing ZoneMinder via apt-get. Once the main dependencies (mySQL and apache2) are installed previously, the apt-get program would take care of the other dependencies, it's what it's made for.

Do:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apache2 mysql-server

Check if both services run correctly by simply:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart

If everything ok, then just install ZoneMinder via apt-get or aptitude:

sudo apt-get install zoneminder

to the moment there's an error on trying to run the zoneminder service, that occurs during the installation and doen't allow to finish the configuration of the program:

Setting up zoneminder (1.28.0-dmo1) ...
● zoneminder.service - LSB: Control ZoneMinder as a Service
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/zoneminder)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Mon 2014-10-27 00:11:56 CST; 9h ago

Oct 27 00:11:56 debiangamboric zoneminder[15901]: Starting ZoneMinder: Can't ...
Oct 27 00:11:56 debiangamboric zoneminder[15901]: BEGIN failed--compilation a...
Oct 27 00:11:56 debiangamboric zoneminder[15901]: Compilation failed in requi...
Oct 27 00:11:56 debiangamboric zoneminder[15901]: BEGIN failed--compilation a...
Oct 27 00:11:56 debiangamboric zoneminder[15901]: Compilation failed in requi...
Oct 27 00:11:56 debiangamboric zoneminder[15901]: BEGIN failed--compilation a...
Oct 27 00:11:56 debiangamboric zoneminder[15901]: failure
Oct 27 00:11:56 debiangamboric systemd[1]: zoneminder.service: control proce...2
Oct 27 00:11:56 debiangamboric systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: Control Zone....
Oct 27 00:11:56 debiangamboric systemd[1]: Unit zoneminder.service entered f....
Hint: Some lines were ellipsized, use -l to show in full.
invoke-rc.d: initscript zoneminder, action "status" failed.
Job for zoneminder.service failed. See 'systemctl status zoneminder.service' and 'journalctl -xn' for details.
invoke-rc.d: initscript zoneminder, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing package zoneminder (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.19-11) ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 zoneminder
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

$ systemctl status zoneminder.service
● zoneminder.service - LSB: Control ZoneMinder as a Service
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/zoneminder)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Mon 2014-10-27 09:59:22 CST; 3min 14s ago
  Process: 8820 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/zoneminder start (code=exited, status=2)

journalctl -xn
No journal files were found