new house = mail fraud

my wife and i just moved to a new house, and we've notices some interesting goings-ons: a week ago this huge package arrives for some random person... "must be a previous owner" we think, setting it asside as we leave. a few hours later when we come home the package is gone. we had planned to stick a note on it for the post man and have it returned, but apparently someone was expecting it. we don't know what exactly it was, but the return address had something like "mini-bikes" in it.

this week we get some annoyingly yellow stickers from UPS saying they have something for us, and we should come by and pick it up. hrmm not expecting anything... though we did notice the neighbors unloading some shiny new mini-bikes from their truck.

some crazy credit card scam to equip pre-teen biker gangs? i don't really care, but what worries me is they're using my address for this crap.

1. 200gig HDD $129 (compusa)
2. ATI TV Wonder VE video capture card $50 (compusa)
3. Color nightvision security camera $60 (fry's)
4. motion or zoneminder on slackware $time

luckily the ati card from compusa is running the BT878 chipset (already in the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel) so it wasn't an issue to get the card up and happy. i've used quad cards before but the input hopping pissed me off so it'll be one card per input. i'm running this on an old P2 400mhz box i had lying around and it seems to be happy. here's some tips for the hard parts:

install mysql

install mp3lame

install ffmpeg:
./configure --enable-mp3lame && make && make install
cp libavcodec/libavcodec.a /usr/lib/

install zoneminder:
./configure --with-ffmpeg --with-mysql=/usr/bin --with-webdir=/var/www/htdocs/zm --with-cgidir=/var/www/cgi-bin/zm --with-webuser=apache --with-webgroup=apache --with-lame
perl zmconfig.pl && perl zmconfig.pl -noi && make && make install

zoneminder seems to get it's paths screwed up often... so if you're missing pictures or can't get the video stream make sure it's going to the right place in /cgi-bin/ ... tail -f /var/log/apache/error_log if you're missing something on the webpage.

also i failed to notice debug messages spit out during ./configure for zoneminder. it wasn't finding the libraries it needed so watch for that.

ended up having to fix mysql perms for zmadmin and zmuser since they didn't get write perms into their own db. the website was only streaming... it couldn't show pictures or thumbs or anything.

also had to dig to figure out how to edit detection zones. you have to click on the number under "zones" on the main page and define some. he's put a ton of work in on this part so the zone config is super cool. really though the zoneminder software freaking rocks...if i had a paypal account i might send this guy some cash.

since i didn't want to deal with cambalooza and java i can't use IE... but mozilla works just fine.

Posted by skp at maio 04, 2004 11:42 AM | TrackBack