Installing ZoneMinder 1.23 under Debian 4.0r2 Etch

ZoneMinder is an open source CCTV application for Linux. A friend of mine first showed it off to me on his Ubuntu system and since having my own dedicated Linux box and a spare webcam lying around, I decided to install it.

The installation requires a basic LAMP installation and a few Perl modules. I have Debian 4.0r2 Etch with already Apache2, MySQL 5 and PHP4 installed. I started with the following guide on ZoneMinder's website: http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/Yadig

Installation was easy to follow except when I came to compile and had a couple of issues locating the correct Perl modules. The guide is written for slightly older versions of everything I had installed. Essentially the only module that seems to not be available from Etch's main repositories was PHP::Serialization. After several unsuccessful hunts on Google, I came across the following CPAN site: http://search.cpan.org/~jbrown/PHP-Serialization-0.27/. This is what I wanted, I downloaded, compiled and installed it and was then able to continue the rest of the ZoneMinder installation.

Step-by-Step installation

1. Run apt-get install with with the required packages. I also accepted any recommended packages by apt-get:

# apt-get install apache2 mysql-server libmysqlclient15-dev php4 php4-mysql g++ make netpbm libssl-dev libjpeg62-dev libmime-perl libwww-perl libarchive-tar-perl libdate-manip-perl libarchive-zip-perl libmime-lite-perl libdbi-perl libdbd-mysql-perl libpcre3-dev

2. Download, compile and install the PHP::Serialization module:

# cd /usr/local/src/
# wget http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/J/JB/JBROWN/php-serialization/PHP-Serialization-0.27.tar.gz
# tar -xzvf PHP-Serialization-0.27.tar.gz
# cd PHP-Serialization-0.27
# perl Makefile.PL
# make
# make test
# make install

3. Download, compile and install ZoneMinder:

# cd /usr/local/src/
# wget http://www2.zoneminder.com/downloads/ZoneMinder-1.23.1.tar.gz
# tar -xzvf ZoneMinder-1.23.1.tar.gz
# cd ZoneMinder-1.23.1
# ./configure --with-webdir=/var/www/zm --with-cgidir=/usr/lib/cgi-bin --with-webuser=www-data --with-webgroup=www-data
# mysql -u root -p < db/zm_create.sql
# mysql -u root -p
mysql> grant select,insert,update,delete on zm.* to 'zmuser'@localhost identified by 'zmpass'; quit;
# make install

4. Create a Debian init.d script as per instructions here and then restart Apache, MySQL and ZoneMinder:

# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
# /etc/init.d/mysql restart
# /etc/init.d/zm restart

6. Connect to http://yourserver/zm/ and modify the following two parameters:

• Under Options, System, set ZM_AUTH_RELAY to none.
• Under Options, Paths, set ZM_PATH_ZMS to /cgi-bin/zms

7. That's it! Just connect your camera and configure!

Update #1: As mentioned on ZoneMinder's Wiki, you should also increase the amount of shared memory, especially if your camera supports 640x480 as it probably won't be possible to use it at higher resolutions until you've done this. If you do have issues getting 640x480, you can instantly test this by issuing the following command and restarting ZoneMinder:

# echo 134217728 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmall && echo 134217728 >/proc/sys/kernel/shmmax

However upon reboot, this will need to be done again so it's best to edit /etc/sysctl.conf to add kernel.shmmax = 134217728. You can quickly do this by issuing:

# echo kernel.shmmax = 134217728 >> /etc/sysctl.conf