Force Zabbix Server to Use Specific Interface

[nelsonab]

LOL!

I'll try and dl the latest then. Why didn't you comment on the blog, it would have saved me a "little" work... ;-)

[Alexei]

I didn't know you are working on this!

[nelsonab]

Hmmm... interesting avenue ya'll took to do it. I'll try and send you the patch anyway. The route I took was a little shorter and had a lower impact on overall code.

I setup a global variable in the comms.c file (ya I know that can be bad form) which had a "set" function associated with it. In the zbx_tcp_connect function it would branch to the bind statement if the BINDIP variable had been set, otherwise nothing would be done.

I'll start testing pre7 to see how it goes.

[Alexei]

It is not only TCP connect! Note that ICMP ping and SNMP connection are also affected.

[nelsonab]

Hmmm... good point.

And it works!

Thanks!

Any word on when the next release 1.4.x release will be?

[tekknokrat]

the approaches to workaround the source ip issue sounds complicated and would change whole networkconfiguration.

+1 for source address at least using listenaddress from config.

[Alexei]

In 1.6, new SourceIP parameter can be used to specify source IP for all ZABBIX processes (agent, server, proxy).

[tekknokrat]

In 1.6, new SourceIP parameter can be used to specify source IP for all ZABBIX processes (agent, server, proxy).

nice I am going to test this.

[nelsonab]

nice I am going to test this.

It works as advertised. :-D

[NOB]

We have Zabbix installed on a LinuxHA cluster. The configuration is as follows:

LNXZBX01
eth0 10.4.4.105
eth0:1 10.4.4.107 (floating/virtual IP)

LNXZBX02
eth0 10.4.4.106
eth0:1 10.4.4.108 (floating/virtual IP)

The cluster does what it is designed to do - fails over the MySQL instance and the IP (10.4.4.107). Unfortunately, the virtual IP is not being used by the Zabbix server to communicate with the agents - instead 10.4.4.105 is used. Hence, the agents reject the connection with the message:

Connection from [10.4.4.105] rejected. Allowed server is [10.4.4.107]

Is there a way of specifying the outbound IP to use for the Zabbix server? Setting the Server=10.4.4.105 in the zabbix_agentd.conf file basically negates the value of the cluster. Not having eth0 set with an IP means that when we choose to take the cluster down, we cannot communicate with the rest of the network.

Any ideas? I saw the patch to work by name, but I was wondering if there was a parameter that I had missed or if the functionality was to be added in the future...?

Yes, now it's possible but it is not really required for your (simple) setup !
The SourceIP= (in 1.6) doesn't work out of the box with fping, e.g. on RedHat 5 Enterprise Linux.
This needs an unofficial patch for fping, and RH5 EL seems to not provide that patched version of fping.
Other posts state that CentOS uses a different option for Fping (-I) than other distro's like Debian (-S).
And, again, this is not necessary. It'll use the normal routing on your box.
Normally it shouldn't matter where the "fping" is coming from.

If you configure the agent like this

Server=10.4.4.107,10.4.4.105,10.4.4.106

you won't have any problems with your virtual IP. The active checks are send to the virtual IP,
which should be available all the time (that's why you installed ZABBIX as a cluster) and the
other IPs of your ZABBIX-Servers are permitted to do normal checks.

IMO, there is just one occasion where you really need this new feature:

If you have DM installed/configured and the ZABBIX-Master is a
cluster.
In that case you can either reconfigure the routing or use SourceIP=

Regards

Norbert.

[tekknokrat]

It works as advertised. :-D

of course, I forgot to post that.