I just installed ZoneMinder tonight. I don’t know if I missed a section in the documentation or something’s just missing — there’s doc for getting the build onto your box (or building your own from source). I didn’t want to install the package and all of its dependencies from their repo, so I manually installed the prereqs from the standard Fedora repositories. Installed the zoneminder rpm and switched from the ‘installation guide’ to the ‘user guide’. Which starts out on a web site. Umm … what web site? There’s definitely something missing here. Their package drops a config file in /etc/httpd/conf.d … *but* it presupposes that it is a dedicated server (which, in fairness, is the recommended configuration).

I edited the zoneminder.conf file and threw the whole thing in a VirtualHost tag, added an SSL cert for the hostname I’m using, and restarted Apache. OK, that’s better … I get *something*. Unfortunately ‘something’ is a massive MySQL error.

Some searching (rpm -ql zoneminder, then search through the files the package installed for something that looks good) yielded a config file at /etc/zm/zm.conf. Went in there, defined a database, user, and password. Created said database & user in mysql & assigned rights. Umm, stranger database error that leads me to believe the database hasn’t been initialized. Oops. LMGTFY. Found a SQL file at /usr/share/zoneminder/db/zm_create.sql and imported *that* … wasn’t sure if it was as simple as changing the zm database name in the SQL file to what I wanted or not, so I just used their default database name. Went back into MySQL and assigned the user I’d created earlier rights to the zm database and dropped *my* database. (Note, if you don’t use PHP date ‘stuff’, you may need to define the time zone in your php.ini file … I’d already set a default for other purposes).

Refresh and voila, I’ve got a system. You’ve got to click ‘start’ at the top for it to, well, start pulling in video feeds. I set up a VERY basic link to our WansView camera — ffmpg type, source is the full videostream.cgi URL, and remote method is “RTP/Unicast”. I can now see the video from our camera via the web site. WooHoo!

Now we need to get the motion detection set up & play with all of the options 🙂