We‘re not always able to use the latest and greatest version of a Linux distribution. Being consultants, we’re usually dropped in an already-deployed environment, where the let’s-upgrade-the-distribution step is not desired or just plainly impossible without breaking everything that’s deployed on it.

This was the case recently, where we had to deploy a Zabbix server on a CentOS 4.x environment. We opted for Zabbix 1.6.1 for several reasons.

We try not to reinvent the wheel when possible, so I grabbed the RPM for CentOS 5 here. Usually this just compiles on Centos 4 without any issues. Not in this case though.

I’ve cooked up 3 small patches to fix the issues that kept Zabbix 1.6.1 from building on our platforms.

Grab them here, here and here. You might want to use this spec file ( based on the one from OCJTech ) as well!

In short, this disables jabber support ( which doesnt work anyways, you need to let an external script do the work! ), updates snmp support to handle older versions of snmp and lowers the required version of curl during the configure stage.

This should give you a nice shining bunch of zabbix-1.6.1 rpm’s for your beloved CentOS 4 system.