Troubleshooting

• System Continuously Rebooting
• System Won't Boot
• System Crashes
• Date & Time
• Shell Access
• Wireless Connection Problems
• Network Shares
• Streaming Hangs When Using ZoneMinder
• Firmware Upgrade Failure

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System Continuously Rebooting

The system will reboot whenever something goes wrong (i.e. disconnected from network, software hangs or kernel crashes). This is accomplished using the hardware watchdog as well as software watch scripts. It is therefore possible that the system enter an indefinite reboot loop if, for example, the network is misconfigured. You can disable the various software watching mechanism in the Expert Settings section.

Most of the reboot loops are caused by a WiFi configuration that is not working. If a wireless connection has been enabled and configured, motionEyeOS will refuse to successfully boot if it fails to connect to it. If you don't (or no longer) need a WiFi connection, disable it. See also Wireless Connection Problems.

System Won't Boot

Make sure that:

• you have used the OS image that is suitable for your board
• you have extracted the gzipped OS image before writing it to the card
• you use an SD card that is compatible with your board
• the system is indeed not booting by connecting a monitor and observing the output

Before reporting an issue, you should:

• try using another SD card (preferably a different model)
• try "burning" images of other OSes that normally work on your device and see if that works

System Crashes

Try:

• disabling all overclocking settings
• replacing your power supply unit with a more powerful one
• removing (or replacing) any USB devices (network adapters, cameras), as some buggy drivers may cause instability
• rewriting the OS image from scratch or replacing your SD card as it might have become corrupt or defective

In addition to these pointers, you could also connect a monitor to your board and try to identify any suspicious output at the moment of the crash. If there's simply nothing you can do about the crash, you should collect the logs and report an issue.

Date & Time

A HTTP request is normally used to synchronize the system time, so make sure the Internet connection is working and allows direct connections on port 80. Initial date is set upon each boot and is updated every 15 minutes. The local time is established by the time zone setting in the web UI. You can tweak some date-related options in the Expert Settings section.

Shell Access

If you connect a monitor and a keyboard to your board, you'll be prompted to login in the text console. Use root for the username and the administrator's password that you had configured in the UI, as password. If you haven't configured it (i.e. you left it empty), you won't be asked for a password. For your convenience, you can use admin as an alias for the root user.

You can also log into your motionEyeOS using ssh or putty. It listens on the standard 22 port, unless you tweaked the system otherwise.

Wireless Connection Problems

Make sure that:

• you have a WPA/WPA2-enabled wireless network; other security/encryption methods won't work with motionEyeOS
• your WiFI hardware/adapter on your device supports the wireless frequency of your network; Raspberry Pi Zero W only supports 2.4 GHz and will not connect to a 5 GHz channel.
• the WiFI channel used by your AP is between 1 and 12; other channels may not be supported by your adapter/country
• both the network name (aka SSID) and the passworkd (aka PSK) are correctly spelled; mind you that both are case-sensitive
• if your WiFi uses WPA2 with a hexadecimal network key, the key is no longer than 63 hex digits; while hex WPA2 keys can technically be up to 64 digits long, a hex key longer than 63 may cause a failure to connect
• you don't have extra spaces or tabs around the configured network name and key
• the WiFi signal strength is good
• the PSU can supply enough current for the board as well as for all the peripherals
• you don't try to access the unit using its wired (ethernet) IP address - the wireless interface receives a new IP address
  • look up the IP address from your router, although some routers may present no information or even wrong information. Ping the IP address to check whether device is reachable: ping <device_IP_address>.
  • use network scanner like Zenmap to scan port 80 (or SSH port 22) on the local network. If the device is reachable on the network, it will show up in the list with default hostname of meye-XXXXXXXX.

Network Shares

Wrong values for the network share settings will stop the camera from working at all. You need to know exactly what your share parameters are and to carefully input them in the UI. The easiest way to tell the various parameters is by understanding an example. Consider the following share path (as it appears in Windows Explorer's location bar):

\\192.168.0.1\myshare1\some\path

• 192.168.0.1 is obviously the IP address of the network server and goes in the field named Network Server; you may also use the server's NetBIOS name (usually the hostname) instead of the IP address;
• myshare1 is the name of the share and goes in the field named Share Name
• \some\path is the path relative to the share; it goes in the field named Root Directory, after changing backslashes to forward slashes (i.e. /some/path)
• needless to say, your credentials (not visible in the example) go in the Share Username and Share Password fields

Avoid using spaces or special characters in your share names, credentials and any directories that make up the relative path.

Streaming Hangs When Using ZoneMinder

When motionEyeOS is used as a network camera for ZoneMinder or any other application that deals with network cameras, the MJPEG video streaming may occasionally hang. The reason is that the motion daemon itself hangs (due to buggy V4L2 drivers?).

When you use the motionEye web UI to check out your cameras, there's a builtin mechanism that detects stalled streams and restarts motion. Now, when you use ZoneMinder you probably don't even open the motionEye web UI and therefore the mechanism never kicks in.

motionEyeOS has a simple workaround for this precise issue: there's a Motion Keep-alive option under the Expert Settings section in the settings panel. Simply enable this option and the motion hanging detection mechanism will be permanently on. This option is not enabled by default due to a small performance penalty.

Firmware Upgrade Failure

The firmware compression format has changed since version 20180224 to accelerate the firmware upgrade process. If you are running older firmware version and have difficulty upgrading to the latest version, you will have to manually upgrade to version 20180224 first by running fwupdate upgrade 20180224 command, then you will be able to upgrade automatically to the latest version.