The three main reasons for surveillance are security, safety and nosiness. Whether you need a visual check on a sleeping baby, or a video of a stranger putting your cat in a wheelie bin, Zoneminder fits the bill. Zoneminder is a sophisticated camera manager, including support for multiple image sources, motion detection, email alerts, and X10 automation. It supports most V4L (Video for Linux) devices, and can control network IP cameras. The web interface makes it ideal for use on our headless server.

In the following tutorial, we will take you through the process required to build a headless surveillance server which can manage image feeds, upload images to another PC, and is accessible from the internet, even using a mobile phone.