Directory Events magically disappeared!

[garbia]

Hello everybody
I am having this issue in my 1.32.4 installation which was stable until a couple of days ago when I went to play one of the cameras and realized that nothing was playing.

Getting a black screen with
"The video could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported"
Live monitoring works, haven't touching anything from Nov 14 when the recording were playing without problems.

Steps:
1) Restart the VM
2) Permissions
#chown -R www-data:www-data /etc/zm
#chown -R www-data:www-data /var/cache/zoneminder
3) checked the logs and found out that events wasn't there anymore!

Solved by creating the directory events.

I am using VMware and ubuntu server 18.04

[andrew-yu]

Hi, what type of video writer do you use? I had the same issues when i configured my monitor's video writer to H264 Camera Passthrough.

[garbia]

Hi, what type of video writer do you use? I had the same issues when i configured my monitor's video writer to H264 Camera Passthrough.

Thank you for your reply
I did a fresh 1.32.4 installation installation, pretty much all default, couple of foscams, rest is Ezviz
It looks like an ownership problem, if thats the case, I have no idea how that happened


This is from the log
2018-11-20 16:50:55 zmfilter_2 1611 WAR DiskSpace: Event does not exist at /var/cache/zoneminder/events/3/2018-11-19/9595:ZoneMinder::Event: Name => Event- 9595 StateId => 1 EndTime => 2018-11-19 23:25:28 Frames => 1084 StartTime => 2018-11-19 23:20:00 Id => 9595 Cause => Continuous MonitorId => 3 Height => 960 StorageId => 1 Width => 1280 Length => 328.89 DefaultVideo => 9595-video.mp4 zmfilter.pl

[Pedulla]

I'll add to this issue. I'm running UB18.04 ZM1.32.2 FreeNAS event storage over NFS.
My events are recorded as H264 passthrough triggered (Nodetect) by low res stream on modetect.

The actual video files are not in the event directory. The snapshot and thumbnail are though.
It doesn't happen all the time for me so it's a hit and miss thing.

I thought it might be an issue with the Hikvision cams.

I meant to spend some more time observing the problem and trying to find out definitively if using the h264 record mode as opposed to passthrough fixes the issue. Just haven't gotten there yet.

What I've observed so far:
- Not all evetns, but hit and miss. don't know the circumstances that cause the problem
- Video file definitely missing in event dir
- LowRes trigger monitor recorded trad mjpeg just fine
- Seems to only happen on hires monitors larger than 1920x1080

[garbia]

What I am trying to understand is how the whole event dir disappeared, as strange as it sound......




root@zoneminder:/var/cache/zoneminder# dir
cache images temp
root@zoneminder:/var/cache/zoneminder# ls -l
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 2 www-data www-data 16384 Nov 19 14:18 cache
drwxr-xr-x 2 www-data www-data 4096 Oct 13 18:44 images
drwxr-xr-x 2 www-data www-data 4096 Oct 13 18:44 temp
root@zoneminder:/var/cache/zoneminder#

https://pastebin.com/V8rmiHJF

[garbia]

I'll add to this issue. I'm running UB18.04 ZM1.32.2 FreeNAS event storage over NFS.
My events are recorded as H264 passthrough triggered (Nodetect) by low res stream on modetect.

The actual video files are not in the event directory. The snapshot and thumbnail are though.
It doesn't happen all the time for me so it's a hit and miss thing.

I thought it might be an issue with the Hikvision cams.

I meant to spend some more time observing the problem and trying to find out definitively if using the h264 record mode as opposed to passthrough fixes the issue. Just haven't gotten there yet.

What I've observed so far:
- Not all evetns, but hit and miss. don't know the circumstances that cause the problem
- Video file definitely missing in event dir
- LowRes trigger monitor recorded trad mjpeg just fine
- Seems to only happen on hires monitors larger than 1920x1080

Different problem, in my case the whole events directory is gone!

[karsta62]

I'm having this "disappearing events directory" issue with v1.32.3 on ubuntu 18.04.
It's happened three times already!?!?

The recovery is to create the directory back, but that's not a fix. All events are lost.

[karsta62]

Right. I got the events directory protected, but just now I was cleaning up events, and suddenly all events from all monitors vanished.
I can only clean one monitor at a time so it's no accident. I saw many events from every monitor, but now they are all zero.
The "events" directory exists as well as the monitor number directories, but all empty.

This is what's in the log:

Can't create frame images from video because there is no video file for this event at (/var/cache/zoneminder/events/10/2019-09-27/15260/15260-video.mp4
JPEGS not saved.zms is not capable of streaming jpegs from mp4 yet
Can't create frame images from video because there is no video file for this event at (/var/cache/zoneminder/events/10/2019-09-27/15264/15264-video.mp4
JPEGS not saved.zms is not capable of streaming jpegs from mp4 yet
Can't create frame images from video because there is no video file for this event at (/var/cache/zoneminder/events/10/2019-09-27/15264/15264-video.mp4
Can't create frame images from video because there is no video file for this event at (/var/cache/zoneminder/events/10/2019-09-27/15260/15260-video.mp4
Can't create frame images from video because there is no video file for this event at (/var/cache/zoneminder/events/5/2019-09-27/15256/15256-video.mp4
JPEGS not saved.zms is not capable of streaming jpegs from mp4 yet
Can't create frame images from video because there is no video file for this event at (/var/cache/zoneminder/events/5/2019-09-28/15267/15267-video.mp4
Can't create frame images from video because there is no video file for this event at (/var/cache/zoneminder/events/5/2019-09-27/15256/15256-video.mp4
Can't create frame images from video because there is no video file for this event at (/var/cache/zoneminder/events/2/2019-09-27/15259/15259-video.mp4
Can't create frame images from video because there is no video file for this event at (/var/cache/zoneminder/events/1/2019-09-28/15271/15271-video.mp4
Event 15312 Not found
Event 15318 Not found
Unable to load event 15318, not found in DB
Unable to load event 15312, not found in DB
No Frame ID specified
Event 15310 Not found
Unable to load event 15310, not found in DB
Can't create frame images from video because there is no video file for this event at (/var/cache/zoneminder/events/9/2019-09-28/15312/15312-video.mp4
JPEGS not saved.zms is not capable of streaming jpegs from mp4 yet
Can't create frame images from video because there is no video file for this event at (/var/cache/zoneminder/events/9/2019-09-28/15348/15348-video.mp4
Event 15353 Not found
Unable to load event 15353, not found in DB

This is serious...

[karsta62]

And it happened again right now!!
zm v.1.32.3

While cleaning up and watching events, all the monitor directories under /var/cache/zoneminder/events disappeared!
It has to have something to do with watching and deleting events in video mode.
Nothing logged about that incident, but when trying to open an event, these appear in the log:
"Can't create frame images from video because there is no video file for this event at (/var/cache/zoneminder/events/1/2020-01-12/24186/24186-video.mp4"

So the database has an event, but the image files do not exist.
testdisk can find the directories, but can't rescue anything all being zero size.

Are we the only two who have this very serious problem??

[Taurus61]

Hi there,
Over here the same problem for several times. Storage for the zm events is on a seperate disk ( 1TB) were i can store a lot of history of my 7 cams. This always worked fine until a while ago when i had to check an event a week ago.
The video could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported was the result.
After some analyzing i found out that the whole events directory was gone. Gone with all my history. I was not happy
But now the weird thing. I shutdown ZM and made the event dir again and did a startup of ZM again. I have 7 cams so i saw that the directories 1 - 7 were created again and new events were stored in it. Next day the event dir was gone again. ZM_AUDIT and filters were disabled.
So i also totally don't understand how this can happen. Look at the logs for hours and hours without any result.
Hope that someone can put some light over this
Regards, Paul

[iconnor]

There is a known issue with 1.32.3 where it will delete the events dir.

I don't remember the details.

You should upgrade to 1.34.0.

[Taurus61]

Even when ZM is not running the events direcetory dissapear. So it looks like ZM has nothing to do with it. In the log there is a constant error :
web_php[27151]: ERR [Path /Camstorage/zoneminder/events does not exist.]
So the question is what is web_php doing while ZM is not running at all?
I would like to upgrade to 1.34.0 but i had the great difficulties to install 1.32.3 so i rather try to fix this issue then upgrade. Did look for 1.34.0 and i even cannot find it anywhere and thats a bad start

[mikb]

So the question is what is web_php doing while ZM is not running at all?

Although ZM is not "running" (by which you mean all capture processes are killed, all camera are freed up, no analysis occurs, no filing of stills or video, no database writing) -- the web interface is still operational. Are you visiting the ZM webpages, and looking around when these errors happen? Have you left the main ZM console page open and refreshing? That would be my thought.

[Taurus61]

Thanks for thinking with me. Maybe you have a point here. While ZM was in a shutdown status the webinterface was up. I will have a look what i find in the logs when the webinterface is down too.
For now i am testing another location for the images and events. Moved them temporary from the separate disk to the disk where ZM itself is installed and in the default directory for 1.32.3 (/var/lib/zoneminder/events). Did that 8 hours ago and still the events directory is alive.
That sounds okay but i cannot hold the events in this storage. So the new question is why can i store the events on a seperate disk only for a short while (1-6 hours)? After that the events dir is gone. S.M.A.R.T. says the disk is a good state.

[Taurus61]

Store the data in another location did not succeeded. After the 8 hours i mentioned before the event dir was dissapeared again.
So next try was moving the events dir to the seperate disk back again and don't start the webinterface. Until now, 13 hours later, it seems the events dir stayed alive. What could the webinterface do to lose the events dir? I would rather know that instead of upgrading to 1.34.0. Besides that i don't think that version is available for my OS (centos7)
Maybe you have a suggestion?
Thanks in advance
Paul