Hi all.
As some may know, I’m maintaining the Zabbix Agent addon package for IPFire, and I would like to perform a little community survey about the future of this package:
Currently, like most main Linux distro’s, we ship zabbix_agentd v6.0 (LTS) which works with Zabbix Server versions 6.0, 6.2, 6.4 and 7.0 and will keep working with 7.2 and 7.4 and so on. (Even Agent v1.4 is still compatible with Server 7.0).
The other way around however is more of an issue: Zabbix Agent 7.0 will not work with a Zabbix Server 6.0 or even 6.4.
Zabbix itself has it’s own repositories for most of the main distro’s providing them with more recent (or older) versions, so users have a choice there that they don’t have here on IPFire. (Although you could compile your own version for IPFire, if you wanted)
So currently we are in line with most main Linux distro’s out there and we will stay with an LTS version.
However the recent Zabbix Agent 7.0 LTS has a few notable new features:
- Heartbeat for Active agents
Shown as a green availability icon in the Zabbix UI. Current zabbix_agentd 6.0 causes this icon to turn gray with status ‘unknown’ on Zabbix Server 7.0 for an IPFire host. - Item-level timeouts
Makes it possible to set higher timeout values for certain checks that could be too slow on embedded or slower systems, enhancing monitoring on such systems… (ex: Pakfire related checks tend to timeout sometimes on slower systems)
In my opinion, it would be nice to have zabbix_agentd 7.0 in IPFire; however with the current capabilities of Pakfire and package management on IPFire, there can only be one version. And if that is version 7.0, then users with a Zabbix Server 6.0, 6.2 or 6.4 will no longer be able to monitor IPFire.
Changing this, to allow multiple available versions for installation on IPFire, would require some internal changes to Pakfire and such (details still need to be investigated).
Since we don’t know how many IPFire users are actually using Zabbix and which versions, I wanted to check if you are actually waiting for this?
- Should IPFire provide a package for Zabbix Agent 7.0 already ?
- If so, should IPFire still provide a package for Zabbix Agent 6.0 at the same time ?
- If not, how long should we stay on 6.0 before going to 7.0 ?
Possible options are:- until feb 2025 when Zabbix general support for v6.0 ends (upstream general fixes development stops for the 6.0 branch)
- until feb 2027 when Zabbix extended support for v6.0 ends (upstream critical, and security fixes development for the 6.0 branch stops)