Victoria's Blog

Problem with Motion on my server

I have an HP N40L MicroServer which I’ve had for over a year now (maybe two!). I chose when I got it to install Ubuntu on it as I thought I needed a little experience in using Linux. It’s been quite a learning curve, but my little server runs 24×7 and has been stable pretty much from day one.

All that changed though during the summer just gone. I stalled Motion on my server as I have a birdbox webcam which used to plug in to my Media Centre PC and another webcam in the hedgehog box. I thought I’d set up Motion correctly according to the guides I’d read online but during the night I noticed the server had frozen. The monitor would not display anything, the keyboard didn’t work and the most odd thing was that the server was thrashing the network!

I ended up re-starting the server a few times (hold power button down) before I could log in to it, but once it was back up I assumed everything was well. However a couple of hours later, the server was non-responsive again. I then disabled motion as that was the last piece of software I’d installed and the problem didn’t re-appear.

This weekend I installed 8Gb of new ram in to the server and thought with the extra ram the problem with motion would go away, but the same thing has happened again! I’ve actually got a screen shot of top from my session as the server becomes un-responsive.

I don’t know what I’ve configured incorrectly, but if you’re reading this and have a suggestion, drop me an email 🙂