Onvif discovery is now enabled by default. This features increases build time, but the benefit is auto-discovery of any Onvif compliant camera. Please note that this feature is still experimental. It has not been tested in a large environment or with a large variety of cameras. Using this tool is largely self explanatory, but if you are looking for documentation it can be found on the @altaroca ’s blog site. As time allows, we will bring the documentation over to our readthedocs site. Volunteers to do this work are welcome.

ZoneMinder now has a telemetry deamon which collects information about your machine. This was done to learn how our user base uses ZoneMinder, the most common system size, choice of distro, cpu, memory, and a couple of other things. This will help us focus our efforts on what features get used the most. Since this was written in Perl, you can easily see for yourself what information is being sent. Note that this feature defaults to ON. If this is not what you want, then you can turn it off under Options. In a future release, we plan to include an install wizard, which will prompt the user about this feature.

Have you ever wished for the motion detection zones to be live, rather than a static image? Well they are now! Creating or modifying zones works exactly the same as before, but with the live stream running in the background. If you need to freeze the stream, there is a Pause button at the bottom of the window to do just that.

There are many other small, technical changes that can be viewed from the changelog.

https://github.com/ZoneMinder/ZoneMinder/releases

We're really excited about future possibilities with this one: our new build for the Raspberry Pi allows it to be used as a camera in a Zoneminder cluster.

This will result in a much better allocation of resources. With data about motion detection handled effectively by the camera, the server's processing load is lightened and it now has the capacity to handle tasks such as facial recognition and license plate detection.

This release brings further improvements to native RTSP support when using a source type of "remote". Newer h264 Foscam cameras should work now. We've made some inroads into getting Grandstream devices to work, but after fixing one issue we immediately ran into another, which has yet to be solved. These devices, along with Trendnet and others, currently experience an RTCP Timeout after streaming video for 10 seconds. We plan to have this fixed in a future release.

The folder location of zm.conf can now be specified at build time.

Instead of patching the source code, package maintainers can now use the /ustils/zmeditconfigdata.sh tool to change any of the values found in the Config dB table prior to building. For details on how to use this tool, execute the script from the command line, with no parameters, to display usage information.

A much improved SELinux policy file has been included for CentOS 6. This file lives under /distros/redhat. Users of zmrepo will automatically get this installed after a yum update to this version of zoneminder. Thanks go to Nate Dobbs for taking the time to do this work.

There are many other small, technical changes that can be viewed from the changelog.

https://github.com/ZoneMinder/ZoneMinder/releases

In recent weeks we've been making functional improvements to the CRM features of Open Print. These upgrades make accessing and managing client records and communications (such as sales logs) easier and faster. On the front end, it's an improved user experience for our clients' sales reps and other employees, while on the backend, the system is continuously increasing its capacity to handle larger and larger numbers of client records.

Begining with the start of the new year in 2015, Intelligent Quote, the web based enterprise solution for printing companies that's been trusted for over a decade, has been rebranded Open Print. Open Print continues to offer all of the pre-existing functionality and more, as it is constantly evolving to improve clients' needs in all aspects of the printing industry. From small commercial shops to large trade houses, Open Print provides the features to drive sales, lower expenses and improve customer service.

Connor Technology is proud to continue to contribute to the development of ZoneMinder, an extremely capable video surveillance system that keeps improving and innovating.

ZoneMinder  Release 1.28 is now out, and supports the newest versions of Linux, up to Ubuntu 14.10. Refer to the release notes for more details.

Thanks to being part of the ZoneMinder team, we’re happy to be able to offer our clients modern, large-scale video surveillance systems that needn’t come at a high ticket price – it’s usually possible to leverage existing hardware and camera infrastructure and build a network system around these.                                                                 

Here is a recent problem encountered on a mail server, along with the solution that worked for us, for the benefit of anyone else encountering a similar issue.

Scenario: I have a two machine cluster for my mail server, using postfix, drbd8.4, ocfs2. 

Problem: With the 3.14 kernel, I get the following errors when creating mail...

• Jul  4 10:58:13 firewall1 kernel: [75434.446285] (virtual,427,1):ocfs2_link:790 ERROR: status = -2
• Jul  4 10:58:13 firewall1 postfix/virtual[427]: 5F272281177: to=<redacted>, relay=virtual, delay=1019, delays=1017/0.06/0/2.4, dsn=4.2.0, status=deferred (maildir delivery failed: create maildir file /var/mail/redacted/new/1404485891.V9300I66ce9eM24833.firewall1.connortechnology.com: No such file or directory)

Solution: Run 3.13.

Connor Technology has been tasked to install, setup and manage a copy of EFI's Monarch system (formerly Hagen OA).  As the installation instructions leave a lot to be desired, here are some notes that may help others during their setup of this system.

First off, Monarch is Windows-based.  You will need Windows Server and SQL Server operating in a domain environment.  The domain is required because (for unknown reasons) in addition to the expected user authentication, each workstation will also need to authenticate to SQL using a domain user.

Second, it's important to use UNC pathnames throughout.  There is no need, or added benefit in our experience, with using C:\ or mapped drive letters.

Finally, since there are no useful errors messages within the software itself, you'll want to first read the instructions carefully and then start diagnostics by running the Upgrade Utility as a test of authentication.  The .pf files is \\server\hagenoa\hsi\startup\ contain paths.  You will want to check and make doubly sure that your paths are correct. 

Point One Graphics has a long and successful history of using Intelligent Quote as their print job estimation engine.  Their recent upgrade to the latest version of IQ has given the company a host of new features as well as greater speed and quote accuracy. The knock-on benefit for other IQ users is that the latest code developments go through a process of real-case testing and further improvement; allowing us to make IQ the most stable and robust estimating, CRM and MIS system available to printing companies.

The new features include:

• Enhanced blogging and social media integration.
• HTML5, providing a better experience on mobile devices and in all modern browsers.
• Significantly reduced page load time and bandwidth usage.
• Smarter estimating with even more configuration options.
• Signature capture support.
• Enhanced barcode support including QR codes.
• RFID Scanning and location detection.
• Network monitoring, uptime and asset management.
• Integrated intrusion detection and blocking.
• Enhanced RMA.
• Drag-and-drop file uploading.
• Enhanced integration with ZoneMinder video surveillance systems.

Topknotch Prep & Print has a long and successful history of using Intelligent Quote as the engine behind their websites topknotch.com, topknotchprint.com, topknotchquote.com and topknotchtrade.com.  Their recent upgrade to the latest version of IQ has given the company a host of new features as well as greater speed and quote accuracy. The knock-on benefit for other IQ users is that the latest code developments go through a process of real-case testing and further improvement; allowing us to make IQ the most stable and robust estimating, CRM and MIS system available to printing companies.

The new features include:

• Enhanced blogging and social media integration.
• HTML5, providing a better experience on mobile devices and in all modern browsers.
• Significantly reduced page load time and bandwidth usage.
• Smarter estimating with even more configuration options.
• Signature capture support.
• Enhanced barcode support including QR codes.
• RFID Scanning and location detection.
• Network monitoring, uptime and asset management.
• Integrated intrusion detection and blocking.
• Enhanced RMA.
• Drag-and-drop file uploading.
• Enhanced integration with ZoneMinder video surveillance systems.