The story begins when I first got my IP camera; a WansCam PT with IR. I got a couple of them for around $50 bucks a pop, which was an amazing price. Still hard to match to this day. I had set it up on the overhang of my parents garage. This caused some issues with their garage door opener due to interference of the WiFi. This cheap camera amazingly having survived two winters without issue, it was however protected by the overhang.
The thing was it only had send a picture to a FTP server at most every second on motion sensor. It could also send email alerts, and a couple other basic features, and could supposedly monitor it remotely if you port forwarded the web hosting port… which I never did for security reasons, for one it only having basic forms authentication, and I setup a more secure SSH tunnel with key authentication to accomplish the same task, but way more secure.
So whenever I had to review an event, or even just check the images I had to scroll through hundreds of pictures, and it wasn’t very good at it either, WiFi, interference, etc.
Then I discovered Zoneminder. It blows my mind. I’m a huge open source advocate. This one… takes the cake; for me!
Installing Zoneminder on Acer Netbook x86.
1) grab Debain from here.
2) grabbed Rufus to place installer on to USb as notebooks don’t have dvd drives.
3) put Debain 8.2 x86 USB installer into notebook USB port. Powered on notebook pressing f12 for boot options.
4) Installed Debain, no Desktop Enviro. This is a server afterall.
5) remove cdrom from /etc/apt/sources.list using vi
6) Follow this: Install Zoneminder on Debian.
7) uncommment HandleLidSwitch=suspend and change suspend to ignore in /etc/systemd/logind.conf
8) Enjoy ZoneMinder on a Acer KA90 netbook, by navigating to http://netbookip/zm
9) I) adding a Wanscam IP camera; In Zoneminder Web GUI -> options -> ZM_OPT_CONTROL enabled. restart zone minder service.
II) ZoneMinder Web GUI -> Add New Monitor. *NOTE* The Zoneminder account here is a operator account I created on the Wanscam WebInterface Prior to setting up ZoneMinder.
Well Poops… I had 3 images here that got lost…
III) Nightvision IR control is controlled with the Wake/Sleep buttons under zoneminder control.
IV) Set your presets, and have fun moniorting and controlling your PT IP camera from zoneminder!
The big benifit here now is Zoneminder will track motion and record events, so no more needing FTP enabled on the IP camera. Plus all events images are kept together and more than 1 a second, I’ve been able to get about 4-5 fps all being saved a seperate jpeg images. My next goal witll be to get a IP camera of otherwise setup to see if I can get recorded video on motion.
I also want to eventually figure out scripted, timed presets for a patrolling type camera on the cheap. Also need to setup POE to reduce cables. I plan on getting that setup using a old Cisco 1811 POE router. I hope this post is helpful for someone out there.
Jan 2018 Update
This server has actually been P2Ved (Physical to Virtual migration). I’ll probably blog about how I accomplished this. The only other server on my hypervisor at this moment. Haha