Video Surveillance With ZoneMinder On Ubuntu

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Submitted by wisu (Contact Author) (Forums) on Fri, 2007-09-07 15:19. :: Ubuntu

Video Surveillance With ZoneMinder On Ubuntu

ZoneMinder is the top Linux video camera security and surveillance solution. In this document I will cover how to get ZoneMinder up and running on Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS or Dapper Drake with the recent updates included.

Hardware Requirements

The surveillance system I am covering here utilizes 4 Dome CCTV cameras hooked up to a single Kodicom kmc-8800 capture card, in addition I also used infrared LEDs so my cameras could see in the dark (honestly I'm abit scared to look). ZoneMinder also does a good job with IP Cameras, unfortunatly they are considerably expensive in my part of the world, hence 4 cameras would blow my budget.

For an in-depth guide of supported hardware one may refer to this link http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_hardware.

In building a system like this one must be aware that it would be storage hungry, therefore an LVM partitioning scheme would be wise to anticipate growth of the system.

In my experience a rig with 4 cameras clogged up my Pentium 4 1,7GHz test system therefore on a production system I used the following resources.

egrep "processor|name" /proc/cpuinfo

processor : 0
model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz
processor : 1
model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.06GHz

cat /proc/meminfo | grep MemTot

MemTotal: 515264 kB

First step after assembly of hardware and strategically placing each CCTV camera, is the Operating System installation. Here I installed a base system without any X-window.

Then we must set an static IP for the system:

cat /etc/network/interfaces

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.202
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1

cat /etc/hosts | grep cctv

192.168.1.202 cctv.bigwisu.com cctv

Then we edit the /etc/apt/source.list to include mulitverse and universe repositories.

deb http://id.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ dapper main restricted multiverse universe

Afterwards we update and upgrade our system:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

In my setup a reboot was required. Next step after reboot is to install Apache, php and MySQL:

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5-mysql libapache2-mod-php5 mysql-server

Then we need to install the following applications and libraries:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libarchive-tar-perl libarchive-zip-perl libdate-manip-perl libdevice-serialport-perl

sudo apt-get install libjpeg62 libmime-perl libstdc++6 libwww-perl zlib1g

Afterwards we download the .deb from the maintainer website:

wget ftp://www.northern-ridge.com.au/zoneminder/ubuntu/dapper/zoneminder_1.22.3-8_i386.deb

Next we install it with the following command:

sudo dpkg -i zoneminder_1.22.3-8_i386.deb

My system had a few dependancy errors, therfore I ran:

sudo apt-get -f install

which automagically fixed any problems.

Here we have already installed all the required packages, next we need some configuration.

First we configure Apache:

sudo ln -s /etc/zm/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d/zoneminder.conf
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

This surveillance application is run by the apache, therefore to enable access to the Video device we must add www-data to the video group:

sudo adduser www-data video

Now we can access the ZoneMinder GUI, from our favorite browser we type in the URL:

http://IP_ADDRESS_CCTV_SYSTEM/zm

From this interface first step is to add cameras:

Here we specify the device, dimension and color:

Result of the newly added camera:

Then we tell ZoneMinder how to process captured images:

In my case I chose to Motion Detect my system, where recording will only take place upon movement.

I can also choose which area to monitor for movement, here is a sample on the main entrance:

Here is my 4 camera CCTV system:

It requires resources as follows:

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apt-get -f ...

Submitted by Anonymous (not registered) on Fri, 2010-05-28 16:52.

Hello,

Just to say that it is highly recommanded to use the option -f [in apt-get command] with extreme precaution as it could generate some problems..

Another way to install ZM on debian like system is to use squeeze dist (it contains zm version 1.24..) which is really straight forward in that it eliminates the headache of dependencies :-)

So if u choose this way of doing, edit /etc/apt/sources.list, comment everything and add the following:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main

then:

# apt-get update

# apt-get -y install zoneminder

# ln -s /etc/zm/apache2.conf /etc/apache2/zoneminder.conf

(I am not sure if in your installation you will have the same names but i guess it will be ok in 98%.. )

if u need help write me

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