Zoneminder for Debian
---------------------

## Time Zone
------------

It is imperative to configure matching system and PHP time zones.

System time zone can be set by the following command:

    sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

PHP time zone can be configured by changing value of "date.timezone" in one
of the following files:

    /etc/php/7.4/fpm/php.ini
    /etc/php/7.4/apache2/php.ini

Please note that MariaDB/MySQL time zone should be identical to system and
PHP time zones. By default MariaDB uses system time zone but it might be
necessary to confirm time zone of the database especially when it is
running on the different host.

Failure to configure identical time zones will result in odd issues like
missing Timeline images, etc.

Changing the location for images and events
-------------------------------------------

Zoneminder, in its upstream form, stores data in /usr/share/zoneminder/.  This
package modifies that by changing /usr/share/zoneminder/images and
/usr/share/zoneminder/events to symlinks to directories under
/var/cache/zoneminder.

There are numerous places these could be put and ways to do it.  But, at the
moment, if you change this, an upgrade will fail with a warning about these
locations having changed (the reason for this was that previously, an  upgrade
would silently revert the changes and cause event loss - refer
bug #608793).

If you do want to change the location, here are a couple of suggestions.
(thanks to vagrant@freegeek.org):

These lines in fstab could allow you to bind-mount an alternate location

         /dev/sdX1 /otherdrive ext3 defaults 0 2
         /otherdrive/zoneminder/images /var/cache/zoneminder/images none bind
         /otherdrive/zoneminder/events /var/cache/zoneminder/events none bind

        or if you have a separate partition for each:

         /dev/sdX1 /var/cache/zoneminder/images ext3 defaults 0 2
         /dev/sdX2 /var/cache/zoneminder/events ext3 defaults 0 2

 -- Peter Howard <pjh@northern-ridge.com.au>, Sun, 16 Jan 2010 01:35:51 +1100

Access to /dev/video*
---------------------

For cameras which require access to /dev/video*, zoneminder may need the
www-data user added to the video group in order to see those cameras:

  adduser www-data video

Note that all web applications running on the zoneminder server will then have
access to all video devices on the system.

 -- Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>  Sun, 27 Mar 2011 13:06:56 -0700