Well, I managed over the past few days to get the security cameras up and running on Fedora 21 Linux 64 bit using Zoneminder.  The cameras were running under WebCamXP under Windows 7 64 bit, but I grew tired of Bill Gates deciding to reboot the server, even though I instructed it not to perform updates.  Microsoft would occasionally decide that it was in my best interest to apply an update automatically, and do a reboot, rather than allowing me to do that.

Click here for some screenshots from the zoneminder site of it in action.  I’m already a fan of it since it’s running under Linux and utilizing mysql.  For right now, it’s running ‘in parallel’ to the Win 7 server, to make sure that there aren’t any issues.  In a week or two, I shall finalize the migration.  Another point that would have probably been an issue with running two security servers ‘in parallel’ would have been overloading my wireless network, so I converted everything to ‘wired’ with the two servers in a temporary location to make sure everything is working properly.  I left the wireless access configured for it to use it as a ‘fallback’ in case the wired ethernet fails.  (The picture above is not my actual cameras, btw.)

Another upside to this is that the zoneminder console is far less cpu hungry than its windows counterpart.  It’s running at around 75% to 85% cpu free.  For you hardware geeks out there, it’s running Fedora 21 (64 bit) on a compaq (or HP, if you would rather) machine with an Intel i5 quad core 3.10 Ghz cpu with 8 GB of ram.  (I checked, and got similar numbers on Fedora 21 32 bit with 4GB of ram.) (The picture above is not my actual console, or web address.)  (Yes, I have my console password protected.)  If anybody is inclined, and needs help to set things up, just ask, and I’ll be happy to post a tutorial here.  (Since it’s linux-based, its hardware requirements aren’t that high.)

Well, since the backup drive started playing nicely and I didn’t have to replace it, extending the root LVM is the new priority, since the system drive is only a 200GB drive, and the / LVM is only 50GB.  Besides the spare 2TB drive, I also bought a 250GB IDE drive in order to expand the root filesystem for a bit of breathing room.

This is the output of df -h and should show the why I need this:  Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_cap-lv_root 50G 19G 29G 39% /
/dev/sdb1 1.8T 883G 858G 51% /mnt/storage
/dev/sda1 477M 192M 257M 43% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg_cap-lv_home 128G 33G 90G 27% /home

You see, only 29GB free…..  /home is in better shape, with 90GB free.

Even though, I will probably use command line tools I checked up on system-config-lvm and found that it had basically been abandoned since Fedora 19, and it now resides in the F19 rawhide repository.    GParted is not a solution, since it doesn’t support LVM partitions.  While not included in F20, Fedora announced news of a new partition manager called blivet-gui.  This is a screenshot of it, and you can see that it looks a lot like GParted,  Since it is not included in the Fedora repositories yet, your only option is to add the repos, so that you can install it and the dependencies using yum.  Here is the link so you you may install the F20 or F21 repository….  vtrefny-blivet-gui-fedora-repo  Simply, download the zip, unzip the file and put the proper repo file in the directory /etc/yum.repos.d/ so that yum can properly install blivet-gui.  I really don’t think that I’ll utilize this tool, but rather expand the root LVM using command line tools such as:  lvdisplay, lvs, vgs, vgextend, and resize2fs, but more on that later……