Matt G. Watson

HowTo: Install Zenoss Core on Gentoo Linux

Synopsis

This How To will be a guide to installing Zenoss Core on Gentoo Linux. Zenoss is an enterprise-grade open-source IT Monitoring and Alerting suite. This guide should work on any Linux distribution, but it has only been tested on Gentoo Linux.

What You Will Need

1. Server running Gentoo Linux
2. MySQL 5.0.x
3. Python 2.3.5 or 2.4
4. Swig 1.3+
5. Net-SNMP

System Setup

Create a new user account that the ZenOSS daemons can run under:

wind ~ # useradd -m zenoss
wind ~ # passwd zenoss
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully
wind ~ #

Next we need to setup some environment variables for the zenoss user. Place the following lines into ~zenoss/.bashrc:

export ZENHOME=/usr/local/zenoss
export PYTHONPATH=$ZENHOME/lib/python
export PATH=$ZENHOME/bin:$PATH

Create the installation directory:

wind ~ # mkdir /usr/local/zenoss
wind ~ # chown zenoss /usr/local/zenoss

Install ZenOSS

Login to the system using your new ‘zenoss’ user account, alternativly, you can use ’su’:

wind ~ # su - zenoss

Make sure your environment variables are set correctly:

zenoss@wind ~ $ echo $ZENHOME
/usr/local/zenoss

Next we need to download ZenOSS, I prefer using wget for this:

zenoss@wind ~ $ wget http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/zenoss/zenoss-2.2.0-0.tar.gz
–2008-06-15 01:03:36– http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/zenoss/zenoss-2.2.0-0.tar.gz
Resolving voxel.dl.sourceforge.net… 208.122.32.195
Connecting to voxel.dl.sourceforge.net|208.122.32.195|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 51834372 (49M) [application/x-gzip]
Saving to: `zenoss-2.2.0-0.tar.gz’

100%[========================================================================================================>] 51,834,372 1.11M/s in 45s

2008-06-15 01:04:21 (1.10 MB/s) - `zenoss-2.2.0-0.tar.gz’ saved [51834372/51834372]

Next we need to extract the tarball:

zenoss@wind ~ $ tar -zxf zenoss-2.2.0-0.tar.gz

Now we just need to start the ZenOSS install script:

zenoss@wind ~ $ cd zenoss-2.2.0
zenoss@wind ~/zenoss-2.2.0 $ ./install.sh

At this point, the install script will ask you a series of questions, the information you enter may vary from mine:

This installer actually builds Zenoss.
For a simpler installation try the VMPlayer Appliance image,
or use RPMs for Redhat based systems.

Building…

Password for the Zenoss “admin” user [zenoss]:
Enter the password again:
MySQL server hostname [localhost]: localhost
MySQL server root username [root]: root
MySQL server root password []:
MySQL event database name [events]: events
MySQL username for Zenoss events database [zenoss]: zenoss
MySQL password for zenoss [zenoss]:
MySQL server port [3306]: 3306

After that its a little bit of a waiting game while you wait for the installation script to compile all of the dependencies that ZenOSS distributes with itself. This would be a good time to go grab a coffee!

The last thing we need to do is set the file ownership and setuid bit for the zensocket command - this is because zensocket requires root privileges to open raw sockets. To do this, switch back to the root user and do these commands:

wind ~ # chown root:zenoss /usr/local/zenoss/bin/zensocket
wind ~ # chmod 04750 /usr/local/zenoss/bin/zensocket

And thats it! You should now be able to access http://<ip>:8080 in your web browser of choice (Firefox appears to be the best supported by Zenoss).

Optional

To get Zenoss to start at boot:

wind ~ # cp /usr/local/zenoss/bin/zenoss /etc/init.d

You will then need to edit /etc/init.d/zenoss:

wind ~ # nano /etc/init.d/zenoss

Add the following line to the script after the comment block:

export ZENHOME=/usr/local/zenoss

And finally, add zenoss to your default runlevel (this will be different if you are non-Gentoo):

wind ~ # rc-update add zenoss default
* zenoss added to runlevel default

You should now be ready to begin adding devices into Zenoss and configuring alerting rules.

Happy Monitoring!