On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 2:15 PM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
- My manager says he "wants to be out of the business" of this, and
wants me to look into "surveillance appliance" packages - that is, a DVR w/ say, four cameras. They're all in
Does this mean ZoneMinder is out of the question, since it's not an "appliance"? I mean, just for the sake of argument, what happens if you buy IP cameras and use ZoneMinder? Isn't that the beauty of an IP camera, you don't need fancy drivers or have to worry about upgrade breakage? (Unless of course your IP stack breaks, but then you probably have much bigger problems.) IP cameras allow you to (1) decouple the camera problem from the DVR problem, and (2) avoid wacky USB/analog capture driver issues.
I don't know if there's anyone selling OTS ZoneMinder appliances, but it's conceivably possible. And if so, it would be like the Untangle filtering package, where the line between OTS appliance and DIY is blurred. (E.g., with Untangle, you can buy a filtering appliance from them, or you can run their software on your own server.)
I guess I fail to see how the previous poster's suggestion (which is basically the same as what I initially posted last week) fails to meet your requirements:
1. Replace cheapo USB cameras with respectable IP cameras. 2. Assign IPs to all cameras. 3. Set up ACLs and/or partition your network to meet security requirements. 4. Designate a single server (physical or VM) to act as your "DVR appliance". In this case, it's a Linux server running ZoneMinder. 5. Configure ZoneMinder to do full-time/always on recording, and setup whatever maintenance and management scripts to need to shuffle around/delete/archive the video.
Once this is in place, I don't see how the end result is any different than buying a "surveillance appliance". Even an OTS package will require some amount of initial setup. But *either way*, once the system is in place and working, it should "just work" and not require any further hand-holding.
Treat the ZoneMinder box as an appliance - that is, if it's working, don't touch it. Don't upgrade ZM or the underlying OS. Just leave it alone and let it work.