MuckNet

Zabbix uses libcurl (libraries, not binaries) to do its Web Scenarios. Web scenarios are very powerful, and allow you to emulate a user experience. Using a Zabbix web scenario, you can emulate logging into your site, accepting the cookie, clicking on something unique (Report showing 10 Last purchases for example), then verify that you get either a particular HTTP code, or that certain text shows up in the response. Way cool stuff. Its got a few kinks to be worked out, however. One very frustrating one is that these web scenarios are not template aware yet… But the zabbix team is working on it, and its going to be a part of a future release. One minor, but significant thing for several of my environments is that the web scenario will error out if the SSL certificate CN (www.yoursite.com) does not match the URL you accessed the web server with.

But Doug, thats bad practice for the CN to not match the url!

I know! However, in most environments its not uncommon for the internal DNS name to NOT match the external DNS name. For example, the CN name for your SSL cert will be www.yoursite.com, but internally you have 10 app servers responding as www. You refer to them as app1.sjc.yoursite.com, app2.phx.yoursite.com.

By default curl (and therefore zabbix) will error out. With the following:

Failed on “HTTPS TEST app1.sjc.yoursite.com” [1 of 1] Error: SSL peer certificate was not ok

I’ve written a patch for the zabbix_server binary, which will instruct libcurl to not error out, and life is peachy! You need to unpack the zabbix source, apply the patch, recompile, and install the new binary. The patch, and steps are below:

I’ve attached the patch to this post, I’d suggest downloading it, instead of copying and pasting, but if you’d like to here it is:

--- src/zabbix_server/httppoller/httptest.c     2007-08-20 12:22:22.000000000 -0700
 +++ src/zabbix_server/httppoller/httptest.c.dp  2007-11-13 17:53:54.000000000 -0800
 @@ -318,6 +318,15 @@ static void        process_httptest(DB_HTTPTEST
 return;
 }

+       /* Process certs whose hostnames do not match the queried hostname. */
 +       if(CURLE_OK != (err = curl_easy_setopt(easyhandle,CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST , 0)))
 +       {
 +               zabbix_log(LOG_LEVEL_ERR, "Cannot set CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST [%s]",
 +                       curl_easy_strerror(err));
 +               (void)curl_easy_cleanup(easyhandle);
 +               return;
 +       }
 +
 lastfailedstep=0;
 httptest->time = 0;
 result = DBselect("select httpstepid,httptestid,no,name,url,timeout,posts,required,status_codes from httpstep where httptest
 id=" ZBX_FS_UI64 " order by no",

Link to Patch: libcurl disable ssl verifyhost

Instructions for installing patch:

Shut down zabbix_server process

/etc/init.d/zabbix_server stop

If you already have your zabbix source unpacked, you can skip the first tar step I’ve checked the patch with Zabbix 1.4.1 and 1.4.2

tar -zxvf zabbix-1.4.2.tar.gz

cd zabbix-1.4.2

wget http://www.muck.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/libcurl_disable_ssl_verifyhost.patch

patch src/zabbix_server/httppoller/httptest.c libcurl_ssl_verifyhost.patch

Then build zabbix_server as normal, for example:

./configure –enable-server –prefix=/usr/local/zabbix –with-mysql –with-net-snmp –with-libcurl

make install

Restart zabbix_server

/etc/init.d/zabbix_server start

Your Internal SSL Web Scenarios should now work! That was easy wasn’t it?

As always, I appreciate any feedback, and would love to hear if this helped you, or if you have any questions!