I seem to have broken snmpd...

[kidzer]

Hi Folks,

I was messing about with Nagios/Zenoss on my server at home (Ubuntu 8.10 - 2.6.27-11-generic), so I installed snmpd to send SNMP updates to them so I could see what kinda information I could get from it.

I installed the package 'snmp' too, as it includes snmpconf, which can be used go generate an snmpd.conf file, useful for somebody with no knowledge of SNMP.

Anyway, I ran through the snmpconf process, and the file was generated, I went to start snmpd with 'sudo /etc/init.d/snmpd start' and when I do, I get the following error;

/etc/default/snmpd: 1: c#: not found

If I try and uninstall/reinstall the snmpd package, I get the following;

Removing snmpd ...
/etc/default/snmpd: 1: c#: not found
invoke-rc.d: initscript snmpd, action "stop" failed.
dpkg: error processing snmpd (--purge):
 subprocess pre-removal script returned error exit status 127
/etc/default/snmpd: 1: c#: not found
invoke-rc.d: initscript snmpd, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error while cleaning up:
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 127
Errors were encountered while processing:
 snmpd
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Running apt-get install -f to fix broken packages returns the same error, and I'm all out of ideas - damn my limited Linux knowledge!

Any suggestions?

Cheers!

[kidzer]

I now seem to have fixed snmpd, I'm not sure what did it though.

I was googling various sources of info about fixing broken packages, followed various steps in different guides etc, none of which seemed to work at all - cleared my apt package cache, did various other things too.

dpkg -l | grep snmpd

still resulted in 3 characters on the left (I've forgotten 'em now) instead of the ii seen beside working packages, so it still wasn't working.

By this time, my searching had led me to /var/lib/dpkg - in which I saw a file called 'status' - had a look in this file for snmpd and saw a few lines mentioning various files - I thought they might be files that are on the machine relating to the package - so I went all gung-ho and brought out my 'rm hammer' (tm) and removed 'em.

aptitude remove snmpd && aptitude install snmpd

And we were back in business!

Just gotta work out how to properly remove Nagios now, having issues with that 'cause I didn't install from the repos, followed the guide on nagios.org, which has you installing from source - make uninstall doesn't seem to be working, unless I'm running it from the wrong directory!

[aidanjt]

If you erased the sources after installing nagios, you'll probably have to run the ./configure script and then make uninstall. Make sure you use the same version tarball as the one you used to install it.

[kidzer]

Nah, I've still got the source I originally downloaded.

The Makefile has the uninstall section commented out with the comment;

# Uninstall is too destructive if base install directory is /usr, etc.

Suffice it to say that I've uncommented the line, sudo make uninstall and it appears to have removed all the stuff it installed, I'll go remove the user/group/database myself - 'cause I made those myself.

[aidanjt]

Yeah, that's why it's usually a good idea to use /usr/local for installing tarball'ed software, as per convention. Unfortunately sometimes the default set by some tarballs configure script is /usr.