Thread: IP Surveillance the Open Source Way

Enterprises today are righting with two major problems: the global economic slowdown. which is getting severe day by day and a fear of repeat tcrrorist attacks. Due to this. many enterpriscs are planning to increase their security budget. But how much does a commercial IP camera management software cost?

The answer lies in open source security solutions. These solutions are of enterprise grade and at the same time very soft on the pocket. Let's start with a remote IF Camera monitoring system which can manage all your IP cameras across differen t locations and can set different alerts and triggers on them depending on your requirements.

The free software works with most wired and wireless IP cameras. and is pretty simple to configurc as well. We installed the software called ZoneMinder on a Fedora 10 machine and the installation was a breeze.

To begin with. you have to check if My SQL and Apache are installed on your machine by running the following commands:

If the output is blank. then these are not installed. To install these packages, check if you are connected to the Internet and then run the following commands:

Once done, you have to install the Zone Minder rpms an'd their dependencies. Again. the easiest approach is to do a yum install for it. After installing Zone Minder. you also have to install ffmpeg and ffmpeg-devel packages. Some of these rpms are not available with the standard Fedora package list. You have to install the RPM fusion package list for yum. You can do so by running the following commands:

Once done, install Zone Minder and ffmpeg packages by running the following commands:



The commands listed on the Zone Minder website for the same task is meant for Fedora 8 or older versions and doesn't work with Fedora 10. So if you are installing it on a Fedora 10 machine like we did, use the commands mentioned above and not the one mentioned on Zone Minder's website. Now open the file called and go to the line that says 'Deny form all'. Comment out this line by putting a '#;' before it. Restart your My SQL and Apache by running the following commands:

From now, the entire configuration is going to be web based and graphical. So you don't need to toggle around multiple terminal Windows. To start with, open the web based management interface' of Zone Minder. In this window, you have to start adding different zones and cameras. There are three types of cameras which you can add in here. One is the local earn, which means any USB web camera connected to the machine where you have installed Zone Minder. Other is a remote IP camera and the third is the file option, where you can poll images periodically from any server. This option is used to monitor and analyze images generated and gathered on any other camera management application. The names for the three options are Local. Remote and File. respectively.

We tried this application by adding a couple of remote IP cameras. We used a D-Link wireless camera called Secure CAM. Once the camera is connected on the same network or with a public IP, to add it to ZoneMinder, click on the New Monitor" button on the front page of the ZM web page. In the general tab. give a name to the Zone, select the Source Type from the drop down menu (local, remote or file). Now select the function which will be performed on the stream. The options are Monitor (for just streaming the feed). Modect (or Motion detect. which will capture a series of still images. If motion is detected. it will raise an alarm), Record (for continuous recording of the feed). Mocord (for recoding video in case of Motion). and Nodect (for no motion detection). This will only raise an alarm if any filter other than motion has happened), and default option None (which means. the zone is disabled). Select the appropriate Function you want in this zone and click on the 'Enabled' option to enable the zone. Now set the Max and Alarm FPS for the data stream. In this case. the system will generate an alarm if the number of fps increases beyond the defined limit.