Installing Obseron as a service on CentOS 6 (Deprecated)

CentOS has discontinued support for version 6 of its operating systems as of November 30, 2020.

These instructions will not be valid as the official CentOS mirrors are no longer available. It is advicable to not to install on CentOS 6 anymore.

These instructions will help in installing Obseron Daemon on a CentOS 6 platform. The Daemon version will run as a service only and is accessible via WebUI or remote connection. Installation may differ from the instructions due to different hardware used for servers. There are only a few mandatory steps, but all the suggested steps are very useful. These instructions should not be followed blindly but adjusted to fit your hardware.

1. Requirements

CentOS 6 Minimal (64-bit suggested)

• Download link to the 32-bit version
• Download link to the 64-bit version

2. CentOS partitions and installation

The following partition table is a suggestion on how to partition your system when you have a single 1TB hard disk.

Mountpoint	Size (GB)	Type	Description
/	10	ext4	(OS root directory)
swap	2	swap	(Swap partition)
/var/lib/obseron	10	ext4	(Configs will be stored here)
/var/lib/obseron/capture/d	100	ext4	(This partition is for the database)
/var/lib/obseron/capture/e	"Use all remaining space"	ext4	(This is for the actual recordings)

After the CentOS installation, log in as root user and you will land on a console view.

3. Installing Obseron

To install Obseron you will first need to install the repository, then the Obseron packages.

#(Install Obseron repository)
rpm -Uvh http://packages.ksenos.fi/centos/6/x86_64/ksenos-release-0.1-3.noarch.rpm

#(Install Obseron Daemon)
yum -y install obseron-daemon

#(Set privileges for recording space and config folders for user "obseron")
chown -R obseron:obseron /var/lib/obseron

After the installation, you should reboot the system. Then once the system is up and running again, connect to its IP address on a browser to get to the configuration page. Next, all you need to do is enter a product key, configure recording spaces and start adding cameras. These are all described in the Obseron Installers guide.

4. Suggested configurations and additional software

4.1 Update all packages.

yum -y update

4.2 Install additional repository for the packages in later suggestions.

rpm --import http://elrepo.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-elrepo.org
rpm -Uvh http://elrepo.org/elrepo-release-6-8.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm

4.3 Install additional programs. "Minimal installation" of CentOS does not include some useful basic packages so these are installed manually.

yum -y install nano wget ntpdate ntp openssh-clients parted smartmontools

nano	CLI text editor
wget	CLI download utility
ntpdate	Manual tool for internet time
ntp	Server and client for internet time
openssh-clients	SSH/SCP tools for SSH connections and file transfers
parted	Partition tool for Linux
smartmontools	Tool for reading SMART data from hard disks

 

4.4 You can access the system settings through the Obseron settings using a separate webmin-obseron add-on.

wget http://share.obseron.com/webmin-obseron-1.930-1.noarch.rpm
yum -y localinstall webmin-obseron-1.930-1.noarch.rpm

After installing the webmin-obseron package the automatic start order for the services needs to be changed so that webmin-obseron starts before the obseron-daemon service.

chkconfig webmin off
sed -i "s/^# chkconfig: 235 99 10$/# chkconfig: 235 84 10/g" /etc/init.d/webmin
chkconfig webmin on

4.5 Disable some selected system services.

#(Automated bug reporting system for OS)
chkconfig abrtd off

#(Firewall for IPv4 traffic, keep it on if you plan on configuring it)
chkconfig iptables off

#(kdump is for creating a crash dump from kernel crashes)
chkconfig kdump off

4.6 Increase the maximum number of open file handles. Too many open file handles have caused some systems to malfunction when the default lower value is used.

nano /etc/security/limits.conf

Add the following lines at the end of the file.

obseron    soft    nofile    10000
obseron    hard    nofile    10000

CTRL + O will save the file, CTRL + X will exit the program.

4.7 To manually start, stop or restart the process

service obserond start
service obserond restart
service obserond stop

Reboot is also suggested after all of these changes. To get all the services running correctly, a reboot is mandatory.