I have been pulling my hair for a few days trying to figure this out and it turns out it's very simple.

So you went through the painful task of installing Zoneminder. You can see the console, but it says

ZoneMinder Console - Stopped

And it appears lot of stuff is not working.

Stop pulling your hair, the solution is to disable selinux. Selinux serves no other purpose than to cause phantom issues on your system that leave no logs or any indication of why something is not working. In fact sometimes it WILL create logs, and they will make absolutely no sense. But in the case of ZM, it just does nothing.

In order to disable selinux, open /boot/grub/grub.conf and add the line selinux=0 after the kernel argument.

So the line will look something like this:

Of course, the wonderful thing is that SELinux as the subsequent SEAndroid project were both developed by NSA to further secure linux for use by the US Government.

You could always create the exceptions for ZoneMinder (but then again, they also promote that it runs with no issues without SELinux) depending on how you're feeling :

http://www.zoneminder.com/wiki/index.php/M..._SELinux_Policy

By default, SELinux in enforcing mode should (keyword should) be logging messages to the console when it denies entires. If you're curious what it's doing, you can change it to "permissive" and it'll allow everything but it'll log what it would have done in various circumstances.

For those interested, more on SELinux here: http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/ and here selinuxproject.org. For my fellow Android users, more on SEAndroid here: http://selinuxproject.org/page/SEAndroid.

(Also, holy crap my first forum post in what feels like forever.)

Josh

I've never been a fan of SElinux. It just blocks stuff and does weird stuff without any kind of notification of what it's doing. Most things such as apache wont work with it enabled either. It seems whenever a program is accessing a file, it does not like that.

I do find the Linux permission system needs a revamp though. It's not granular enough. Would be awesome if it worked more like NTFS. Or heck, keep it the same way, but with a way to specify/break inheritance. That way if I copy a file/folder somewhere it inherits the permissions of the parent folder instead of taking the permissions of the user doing the move/copy. That's a huge pet peeve I have with Linux. Always fighting with that and writing "Reset permission" scripts.