Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Zoneminder Security Surveillance Video Server Install

If you are looking for a good video security surveillance system look look no further than Zoneminder. It's free, open source and the features are excellent. Below is a step by step recipe for installing with Fedora 9 Live CD. It will take approximately 30 minutes to get up and running. For video surveillance capture cards that are certified to work with Linux and Zoneminder try Bluecherry. Zoneminder works great with multiple security camera types including day/night surveillance cameras, ip surveillance cameras and pan-tilt-zoom security surveillance cameras. Often, some of the vendors specializing in security equipment or surveillance equipment will run specials on capture cards and cameras.

Zoneminder works great for home security surveillance or office video security surveillance. This video surveillance server has all the features of the expensive surveillance packages including video motion detection, video masking (removing areas that aren't important), video zones, video triggering, etc. You don't even need a powerhouse computer as a video server.

You can also monitor the surveillance server from over the internet and watch what's going on while you are away! For a sample video of what this system is capable of, watch a sample here.

1 Install Fedora 9 LiveCD
Tell it to remove all partitions
Manually select Hostname to be whatever name you want
Time Zone (Select New York) and uncheck UTC
Select Root Password
Finish and reboot
On bootup
Disable Firewall
Disable SELinux
Enable Network Time Protocal
Create user name and password
Reboot

2 Open terminal
Log in as root (su)
type yum -y install mysql-server ; yum -y insall zoneminder

gedit /etc/httpd/conf.d/zoneminder.conf and remove or add # in front of line indicated and save

Go to services and select, start and save httpd, sshd, mysqld

3 Download and install webmin http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/webadmin/webmin-1.390-1.noarch.rpm

4 Open firefox and go to localhost:10000

Log in as root (root here, not su)

Go to services->MySQL
Under MySQL databases click create db and name it zm Don't select anything other than the name
Click on the zm database you created.
Select execute sql and browse from local file to /usr/share/zoneminder/db/zm_create.sql

5 Go to terminal as root and type service zoneminder restart

6 Go to Firefox, to to localhost/zm and it should be ready to go.

4 comments:

magnum said...

Hi
Thank you for your step by step procedure.
i have installed and can run zm. cannot view cameras.

is there any configuration for the capture card. any steps to follow.
can you suggest any capture cards.


Thanks a lot.

Unknown said...

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Unknown said...

Hi,

You seem to have a nice blog on home security. Securing the home from thieves has become an vital issue in this modern age. On the of the best way to
do that is by installing dvr surveillance system at home.

Unknown said...

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CCTV for Homes. Thank you.