Upgrading Zenoss 4.2.3 to 4.2.4 on CentOS 6.4

The guides I am using for this procedure includes:

The resources above have somewhat conflicting information about upgrading to 4.2.4.  The installation guide lists a long set of instructions to perform but the blog, including the comments, suggest a much simpler course of action.

Some of the steps listed in the installation guide is not even required in my opinion.  For instance, the installation guide included the upgrade of MySQL server as part of the Zenoss upgrade.  However, as I found out after testing a fresh install of Zenoss 4.2.4, the MySQL version installed by the 4.2.4 auto-deploy script is the same as the one used by the 4.2.3 auto-deploy script.  Therefore, I would assume that not all the of the listed actions from the installation guide are totally necessary.

Let’s try the simplest upgrade as suggested by the blog.

Grab the 4.2.4 installer rpm.

# wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/zenoss/zenoss-4.2/zenoss-4.2.4/zenoss_core-4.2.4.el6.x86_64.rpm

Stop Zenoss daemons.

# service zenoss stop
Daemon: zenwinperf stopping...
Daemon: zeneventlog stopping...
Daemon: zenwin stopping...
Daemon: zenjmx stopping...
Daemon: zenrrdcached stopping...
Daemon: zenprocess stopping...
Daemon: zencommand stopping...
Daemon: zenperfsnmp stopping...
Daemon: zenmodeler stopping...
Daemon: zentrap stopping...
Daemon: zenactiond stopping...
Daemon: zenstatus stopping...
Daemon: zensyslog stopping...
Daemon: zenping stopping...
Daemon: zeneventd stopping...
Daemon: zenjobs stopping...
Daemon: zenhub stopping...
Daemon: zopectl .
daemon process stopped
Daemon: zeneventserver stopping...

Install redis.

# yum --enablerepo=epel install redis

Install the installer rpm.

 # rpm -Uvh zenoss_core-4.2.4.el6.x86_64.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
Upgrading from zenoss 4.2.3 to zenoss 4.2.4
Stopping any down-level Zenoss daemons...
Stopped.
   1:zenoss                 ########################################### [100%]

At this point, as I understand it, there will be some problems with passwords not matching in configuration files, because the auto-deploy scripts (for both 4.2.3 and 4.2.4) would perform password synchronization, which is not done by the RPM.  Let’s check them.

# cat /opt/zenoss/etc/hubpasswd
admin:zenoss

# cat /opt/zenoss/etc/global.conf | grep password
zodb-password <some other password>
zodb-admin-password xxxxxxxxx
amqppassword <some other password>
zep-password <some other password>
zep-admin-password xxxxxxxxx
hubpassword <some other password>

The password in the hubpasswd file should match the <some other password> in global.conf.  So let’s change it.

# vi /opt/zenoss/etc/hubpasswd
# cat /opt/zenoss/etc/hubpasswd
admin:<some other password>

Finally, start the zenoss service.

# service zenoss start
Zenoss upgraded.  Running data migration scripts...
Upgrade pre step
Checking RRDtool version >= 1.4.7: [ OK ] 1.4.7
Creating database: zenoss_zep
Applying schema version: 6
Dropping database: zodb_session
Creating database: zodb_session
Applying schema version: 1
Applying schema version: 2
Upgrading to use persistent sessions...
Already using persistent sessions or using custom session storage. zope.conf will not be altered.
Starting zeneventserver...
Migrating data...

...
...

Upgrade install post step
Zenoss upgrade complete.

And the upgrade is done!

The ‘localhost’ device started to give out warnings in Zenoss that the zen processes are not running, but after a remodel of the device, the warnings stopped.

3 thoughts on “Upgrading Zenoss 4.2.3 to 4.2.4 on CentOS 6.4

  1. Thanks for this. It was exactly my problem with the hubpasswd. Zenoss has always been such a pain in the ass to upgrade. There’s been so many times I have thrown up my hands and created a new instance because it takes less time to figure out than to hunt down a piece missing.

    I just have one major knowledge gap issue to figure out. How to create a event filter to silence messages that are already a part of an event class. There are just some windows and other devices errors that aren’t important. I have been search for a good walkthrough on how to do that.

    Thanks again for this helpful post though. I definitely solved my issue.

    1. Hi Nate,

      I’m happy to hear that this post has been helpful to you. I agree with you that performing upgrades to Zenoss has always been problematic. However, the alternative of performing a fresh install and re-registering all the monitored devices would be so time consuming. And to lose all those beautiful RRD files..

      I am sorry I cannot help you with the event filter thing as I only use Zenoss for simple monitoring. Good luck!

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