ZABBIX user account

[Neo]

Hi I was trying to install ZABBIX for a friend but am stuck.
Do I have to do the complete installation with the zabbix user accoutn that I created?

[Nate Bell]

Where exactly did you get stuck?

It's been a while since I did a fresh install of Zabbix, but I'm pretty sure most of the installation is done with the admin or root users. You might find the zabbix user needs ownership of a file after creating it with another user, but you can solve that by using chown.
Nate

[Neo]

I got ZABBIX installed after all (not fully though). I have a few questions that were not clear in the installation instructions.

# 6. Configure /etc/services

The step is not real requirement. However, it is recommended. On the client (monitored) machines, add the following lines to /etc/services:

zabbix_agent 10000/tcp
zabbix_trap 10001/tcp

Which is the monitored machine? If it is not the server then why is this step in the server installation?

# 7. Configure /etc/inetd.conf

If you are going to use a non-daemon versions of ZABBIX trapper, add the following line to /etc/inetd.conf:

zabbix_trap stream tcp nowait.3600 zabbix /opt/zabbix/bin/zabbix_trapper

If you plan to use zabbix_agent instead of the recommended zabbix_agentd, the following line must be added:

zabbix_agent stream tcp nowait.3600 zabbix /opt/zabbix/bin/zabbix_agent

Restart inetd

shell> killall -HUP inetd

I just want to use whatever is the default (not the non-daemon or anything) so I guess I can skip this step, Isn't that so?

Also the Fedora Core 3 machine where I installed this did not have a /etc/inetd.conf file.

[Nate Bell]

Yeah, you can skip both of those steps.

The terms in #6 are from older versions of Zabbix when the zabbix_server was split into zabbix_trapper and zabbix_sucker. I didn't change anything to the services file and things seem to be working fine. That step may be in the server install part of the manual because you might want to have an agent monitoring the zabbix server.

As for #7: If you just want the agent to run as a daemon process, then you don't need to change anything in inetd. This file is used to start up and stop processes as they are needed. So instead of having the zabbix agent always running, you could configure it to start up when the zabbix server needs to check an item, fetch the item, wait a bit to make sure there aren't more checks coming, and then stop. So if you just want your zabbix agent to always run in the background, you can just start it with ./zabbix_agentd, or add a start up script to init.d.

Hope that's what you were looking for.
Nate