Installing/compiling zabbix agent on openSUSE/SLES15

[nprdev]

I wanted to share the result of a couple hours of work trying to get zabbix-agent to compile on SUSE (which doesn't provide packages on its installation media).

I tried to be as thorough as possible in naming all the lib packages it needs, but I may have missed some as I haven't tried this on a clean machine yet. Worst named lib: No idea why SUSE decided to name it prce-devel and not libpcre-devel.

zypper install -y gcc git make makeinfo autoconf automake glibc-devel-static gettext-tools gcc-c++ libevent libevent-devel libresolv libresolv-devel pcre-devel

cd /usr/src/
wget https://cdn.zabbix.com/zabbix/sources/stable/6.4/zabbix-6.4.4.tar.gz
tar -xvf zabbix-6.4.4.tar.gz
rm zabbix-6.4.4.tar.gz
cd zabbix-6.4.4/

aclocal && autoreconf -f && automake --add-missing

./configure --enable-agent --disable-server --enable-ipv6

sed -i "s/^\(LIBPCRE_LIBS.*\)/\1 -lresolve/g" Makefile

CORES=$(nproc)
env LDFLAGS=-lresolve make -j$CORES 2>&1 | tee log

Then, to install the binary to the system:

make install​

The online instructions about compiling zabbix are out of date as zabbix now uses autotools. I had to experiment to find out that "autoreconf" and "automake --add-missing" are needed. It's really hard to find out how to use automake if you're not familiar. Please update the instructions so those compiling will not either waste hours of time figuring this out or, for less patient/experienced sysadmins: give up entirely.

This may be due to autotools only being v2.69 on SUSE, and not the newer 2.70/2.71; but by default the makefile it makes will not compile with a bunch of cryptic errors about unresolved symbols, due to the fact that it's missing "-lresolve" so the linker won't see DNS functions in glibc.

I tried to fix this by appending this to "LIBS".

This also would not work for two reasons:

1. The makefile, if modified, won't actually re-compile. Something with automake/autotools/make is causing make to think the file was not modified. So in that case I did the nuclear option:

rm -rf /usr/src/zabbix-6.4.4/*

(do everything again from the beginning).

2. After a few tries I found out that "LIBS" actually isn't appended to the command line.

So I hacked it and added "-lresolve" to LIBPCRE_LIBS (which is required by default), before trying to run make.


.

[tim.mooney]

I'm really confused by your post.

Aren't the packages you need downloadable here, after selecting "SUSE Linux Enterprise Server" for "OS Distribution": https://www.zabbix.com/download

Also, going back as far as I can remember, the "Compiling from Source" section of the documentation has mentioned "configure". For example, the 3.0 section of the documentation is very old, but it mentions configure: https://www.zabbix.com/documentation...lation/install

[nzahar]

Hi nprdev ,

I am about to start the same exiting journey as you described previously.
Could you please confirm if it actually compiled at the end ?
Did you actually create an rpm at last ?
Since I have a contract to do babysitting for more than 200 LPars on Suse (mainly) and RHEL, perhaps we could work together to maintain a repo as well
(Yes you guest correctly ... SAP apps... :-)
Thanks in advance,

Nikos

[nprdev]

In the end I compiled it with the option as indicated.

When installing SLES, you will want to make sure you've selected the 'development tools' repository (module in SLES parlance) to get access to compiler tools. It's possible to add it later on after you've already installed the machine, but I believe you do have to get the 'name' and 'alias' correct in zypper for things to work properly if you later activate the OS.

For completion's sake if anyone stumbles upon this in the future, here's my actual solution. Change the agent version as appropriate:

# Makefile IS BROKEN. option/library -lresolve is missing.

zypper install -y gcc git make makeinfo autoconf automake glibc-devel-static gettext-tools gcc-c++ libevent libevent-devel libresolv libresolv-devel pcre-devel

ZBXMVER=6.4
ZBXVER=6.4.21

cd /usr/src/
wget https://cdn.zabbix.com/zabbix/sources/oldstable/$ZBXMVER/zabbix-$ZBXVER.tar.gz
tar -xvf zabbix-$ZBXVER.tar.gz
rm zabbix-$ZBXVER.tar.gz

cd /usr/src/zabbix-$ZBXVER/

aclocal && autoreconf -f && automake --add-missing

./configure --enable-agent --disable-server --enable-ipv6

sed -i "s/^\(LIBPCRE_LIBS.*\)/\1 -lresolve/g" Makefile

CORES=$(nproc)
env LDFLAGS=-lresolve make -j$CORES 2>&1 | tee log

make install​

useradd zabbix
groupadd zabbix
usermod -a -G zabbix zabbix

mkdir /var/log/zabbix
chown root.zabbix /var/log/zabbix

chmod g+w /var/log/zabbix​


cat << EOF > zabbix-agent.service

[Unit]
Description=Zabbix Monitor Agent
After=syslog.target network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/zabbix_agentd
User=zabbix
Group=zabbix
PrivateTmp=yes
RuntimeDirectory=zabbix
PIDFile=/run/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.pid

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF​

mv zabbix-agent.service /etc/systemd/system​
​
cat << EOF > /etc/logrotate.d/zabbix-agent
/var/log/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.log {
    weekly
    rotate 7
    compress
    delaycompress
    missingok
    notifempty
    create 0640 zabbix zabbix
    sharedscripts
    size 10M
    sharedscripts
    postrotate
     systemctl restart zabbix-agent.service
     sleep 4
    endscript
}
EOF​

Then, in the config file, the minimum set of options needed:

PidFile=/run/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.pid
LogFile=/var/log/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.log
Server=<zabbix server or proxy IP>
ServerActive=<zabbix server or proxy IP>
Hostname=<full hostname>​

Note: if Zabbix does start and systemd reports it down, or systemd ends up killing it, there's a problem with the PIDfile. Both systemd and zabbix need to know where it is, systemd needs to control the /run/zabbix/ directory (as /run is wiped upon boot), and the ownership of said file and folder need to be correct for everything to integrate properly. (Systemd will use that file to see if zabbix is running).

The log file rotation by default keeps 7 weeks of logs, or 80MB, whichever happens first. You can increase or decrease it if you need to.

To activate the agent run:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable zabbix-agent
systemctl start zabbix-agent

[Markku]

Curious: why don't you use the Zabbix-provided SLES 15 packages?

Markku