ARM Single Board Computer (SBC) Support & Installation Instructions

Introduction

The Nx Server application is a lightweight application designed to run on both high and low-power computing hardware - including the Raspberry Pi and various other ARM-based Single Board Computers (SBC).

Which ARM-based SBC's are currently supported?

You may want to read our Arm Support Policy for more information. Additionally, most well-known Single Board Computers (SBC) like Raspberry Pi are not designed for tasks such as constant video recording/streaming, so they should be modified to be able to run the Nx Server application without any issues. See "Building Linux-based NVRs".

Installation

Below you will find the instructions on how to install the Nx Server application onto your ARM-based SBC.  

Note: When the *.deb package is installed on the Raspbian Stretch Lite version (aka headless version) instead of the desktop version, the user needs to install additional dependencies called 'cifs-utils'.

Step 1: Install the Nx Server application

1. Log into your ARM-based device and launch the terminal application on your device with Ctrl+Alt+T if you are using a graphical interface. If you installed the operating system headless, you are in the terminal after booting up. 
2. Switch to root. 
   

   $ sudo su

3. navigate to the "/" folder.
   

   $ cd /

4. Download the latest Nx Witness Pi installation package on your Raspberry Pi/Banana Pi with the following command.
   

   $ wget http://updates.networkoptix.com/default/31398/arm/nxwitness-server-4.1.0.31398-linux_arm32.deb

5. Install the Nx Witness Mediaserver via dpkg command
   

   $ dpkg -i ./nxwitness-server-4.1.0.31398-linux_arm32.deb

Step 2: Mount the storage 

1. Connect the storage to the ARM-based SBC.
2. Find the universally unique identifier (UUID) of the drive:
   

   $ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/

3. Note the output for ../../sda1 (USB devices are often /sda1, but it could be different).
4. Create a directory for the storage drive.
   

   $ sudo mkdir /media/usb

5. Change the owner for the storage:
   

   $ sudo chown -R pi:pi /media/usb

6. Mount the storage:
   

   $ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb -o uid=pi,gid=pi

7. Open the file systems table configuration file:
   

   $ sudo nano /etc/fstab 
   

   and add the following line to the file:
   

   UUID=<THE NOTED OUTPUT> /media/usb ext4 auto,nofail,noatime,users,rw,uid=pi,gid=pi 0 0

8. Press Ctrl+X and select (Y)es. 

Step 3: Doing a clean uninstall (optional) 

In case you want to do a clean uninstall of the application on your ARM-based device, please follow the next steps. 

1. Log into your ARM-based device and launch the terminal application on your device with Ctrl+Alt+T if you are using a graphical interface. If you installed the operating system headless, you are in the terminal after booting up.
2. Remove the networkoptix directory.
   

   $ sudo rm -rf /opt/networkoptix/

3. Remove the networkoptix-mediaserver directory.
   

   $ sudo rm /etc/init.d/networkoptix-mediaserver

Take into account that these commands will not remove the video data that was recorded by the server to added storage.

If necessary, please locate the directory with the data and clean it up. With the rm command, in this example, this would be:  

1. Remove the video data directory.
   

   $ sudo rm -r /media/usb

Questions

If you have any questions related to this topic or you want to share your experience with other community members or our team, please visit and engage in our support community or reach out to your local reseller.