ZoneMinder and NAS

[notabenem]

Using 1.24.2 on Fedora Core 7, CPU is Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GIG of RAM

To be able to separate the storage from the processing machine, I bought a Synology DS209 NAS box. I connect this box using a GBit Ethernet switch to the ZoneMinder server using NFS, so that i mount
/NAS_IP/volulme/exported_dir -> /home/www/events

NFS connection is stable with a 12MByte/s burst read/write speed. However, during operations, Zoneminder drops a lot of messages into /var/log/messages about "Incomplete frame read" and "Incomplete frame write". Yet the NAS BOX contains all the images in sequence 001, 002, etc. They are readable, displayable.

Now once or twice a day up to 10 STRANGE events appear in the event listing. Their duration is extermely long (several millions of seconds), yet contain only up to 100 frames. Such events can't be viewed, they display only black images and ZM gets completely STUCK (no web response). The only solution is to restart the ZM service.

I don't yet know how do those events appear in the DB, but they only appear if the events folders is mapped to an NFS disk. The messages about "Incomplete frame read/write" also appear ONLY if I am using a NFS mapped directory to store the images. Ring buffers and SHMEM is set correctly, no messages in the logs about them.

If I let ZM write images to local disks, ZM is pretty stable.

Please advise, what to test and how to configure ZM to work through NFS as good as with local disks???

[curtishall]

You might try an iSCSI target instead of NFS.

[cbreaker]

Eh, NFS can be very effecient and I doubt iSCSI would make a damned bit of difference if the target is the same box.

Of course, it could be that the implementation of NFS on your NAS is poor, but I'm guessing the problem lies elsewhere.

I myself am going to try to use an NFS export (on a Windows box) for this purpose.

[notabenem]

cbreaker: thanks for looking into it.
Please let me know the result. I've already tried all kinds of NFS and network optimizations, but they did not really help (Jumbo frames, socket sizes, NFS buffers, NFS threads = hardcoded to 1 on the box, but according to stats it's ok).

iSCSI is already present in the current beta firmware of the box, but since it's not possible to downgrade, I can't test it yet.

I am awaiting your report.

[spazlon]

Sorry to revive such an old topic, but I'm stuck and hoping somebody will be interested in helping me finish the project.

I was able to install Zoneminder on my Synology NAS with Debian Chroot, then just apt-get install zoneminder. The problem is that the MySQL and Apache running on the main system conflicts with the Debian versions that Zoneminder tries to install. I need to figure out a way to tell ZM to use the applications already installed, maybe linking the folders or something.

I'm running ZM 1.25 but the problem would be the same on 1.24.

Here are the steps I used to get Debian Chroot on the Synology. I have an Atom processor but it should work with the ARM procs as well.