ZoneMinder: Tools to monitor with security cameras in Linux

ZoneLess is a set of applications, tools that allow us to control, monitor our security cameras, surveillance.

What is ZoneMinder?

As I just said, it is a set of tools that help us to monitor, control our security cameras. It is made up of several scripts (perl, etc), as well as a web interface (PHP) that makes the whole process more user-friendly.

Suppose we have a business and acquire several surveillance cameras in a local store, or it may be the surveillance system of a communications node, the fact is that we need a system that allows us to see what is happening in the premises we monitor, through simple and intuitive options we can start or stop recording, rotate the camera (if the hardware supports it), etc.

Here are several screenshots of ZoneLessWell, as they say around here, a picture is worth a thousand words:

ZoneMinder Installation

First of all, I recommend that you access the ZoneMinder Wiki, as they must take into account compatibility between the hardware they have with the system they will install.

In the same wiki there are excellent installation guides for Ubuntu y CentOS, we will take as an example the guide of Ubuntu 14.04 with ZoneMinder 1.28.1:

First we must have an environment installed LAMP, that is, Apache, MySQL and PHP. I will not stop at this, because here in the Blog we have already put several tutorials for it.

Then we will edit the MySQL configuration file, to make a change and then restart the service:

sudo nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf

We add the following under [mysql]:

innodb_file_per_table

Then we restart MySQL:

sudo service mysql restart

We also need to enable the Apache cgi module, which is not activated by default:

a2enmod cgi

And we restart Apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

Now we will add the ZoneMinder repository and install it:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa: iconnor / zoneminder sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install zoneminder

Installation of extra packages required by ZoneMinder

Also, we will need to install some extra packages:

sudo apt-get install libvlc-dev libvlccore-dev vlc

Also, we'll edit the MySQL daemon startup file to specify that it wait a few seconds before launching the service:

sudo nano /etc/init.d/mysql

There we add under 'start) ó start () { following:

Sleep 15

It can look like this:

start () {sleep 15 echo -n "Starting $ prog:"

Now let's go on to configure Apache, we must create a directory (in case it does not exist) inside which, we will put two files (symbolic links actually):

sudo mkdir /etc/apache2/conf.d sudo ln -s /etc/zm/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d/zoneminder.conf sudo ln -s /etc/zm/apache.conf / etc / apache2 /conf-enabled/zoneminder.conf

Let's add the user www-data (which is the user with which Apache interacts with the system) to the video group:

sudo usermod -a -G video www-data

Ready, we can restart Apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

Now we can open the web interface by accessing: http://direccion-ip/zm/

That is, we put the IP address of the server where we just installed ZoneMinder, or the subdomain (Ex: camaras.minegocio.com)

Once inside the PHP interface, you can configure, add cameras and everything with simple options, at the click of a button 😉

Conclusions about ZoneMinder

Personally, whatever it takes to increase security, no matter how paranoid he may seem, I support him. When you have a Node or even more, a DataCenter, security is never little or enough.

You can have excellent security through software, in fact not recently we leave some tips, but it is useless to have an excellent firewall, complex access passwords, if physical access is not controlled by security cameras, for not having physical barriers or a perimeter security system.

By the way… ZoneMinder is on GitHub 😀