Zabbix-agent stuck restarting Debian

[dreas]

We very often have the problem when restarting the Zabbix agent that the agent processes get "stuck", and Zabbix fails to start again. We need to kill the processes, and then start Zabbix. This is on Debian Lenny stable.

We switched to using "invoke-rc.d zabbix-agent stop && sleep 10 && invoke-rc.d zabbix-agent start" but it still occurs:

 22990:20091002:003204 Got signal. Exiting ...
 22991:20091002:003204 Got signal. Exiting ...
 22995:20091002:003204 Got signal. Exiting ...
 22990:20091002:003204 zbx_on_exit() called.
 22994:20091002:003204 Got signal. Exiting ...
 22992:20091002:003204 Got signal. Exiting ...
 22993:20091002:003204 Got signal. Exiting ...
 22990:20091002:003204 One child process died. Exiting ...
 22990:20091002:003204 zbx_on_exit() called.
 22990:20091002:003204 Cannot remove PID file [/var/run/zabbix-agent/zabbix_agentd.pid] [No such file or directory]
 22990:20091002:003206 ZABBIX Agent stopped
 21603:20091002:003216 zabbix_agentd started. ZABBIX 1.4.6.
 21604:20091002:003216 zabbix_agentd collector started
 21605:20091002:003216 zabbix_agentd listener started
 21606:20091002:003216 zabbix_agentd listener started
 21607:20091002:003216 zabbix_agentd listener started
 21608:20091002:003216 zabbix_agentd active check started [hostname.com:10051]

Any suggestions to avoid this? This happens randomly on different machines.

[richlv]

possible source of problems when starting zabbix daemons was fixed in version 1.6.5.
1.4.6 isn't too recent

[dreas]

Thanks for the post! I am aware 1.4.6 is not very recent, but I like to stick to Debian stable. Do you know what the exact fix was? I can then report it to the Debian packager (and manually fix it myself).

[richlv]

revision 7366 in 1.6 branch.
note that i'm not giving any guarantees that it fixes the issue you are seeing

[dreas]

revision 7366 in 1.6 branch.
note that i'm not giving any guarantees that it fixes the issue you are seeing

Well then I can just file a bug report here

[richlv]

well, bugreports against 1.4 aren't accepted in zabbix tracker, and i somewhat doubt debian packagers would be excited to figure out such (possibly) obscure problems...

btw, your logfile snippet shows one zabbix agentd process finishing, and other starting up. so i'm a bit puzzled as to what the actual problem is