snmpd does not update date due to filesystem access error in new ubuntu versions

Question

My Cacti stopped graphing network data for servers that I monitor using snmp. I am able to manually query the corresponding counter using snmpget

$ snmpget -v 2c -c XXX XXX .1.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.6.4
iso.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.6.4 = Counter64: 13662736603625

However the Counter does not increase until I restart snmpd on the server.

In the syslog of the server I noticed theese lines:

Jun 17 16:25:33 ns375911 snmpd[18307]: Cannot statfs /sys/kernel/security#012: Permission denied
Jun 17 16:25:33 ns375911 snmpd[18307]: message repeated 17 times: [ Cannot statfs /sys/kernel/security#012: Permission denied]

The problem appears to affect only servers that I installed after a certain date (somewhere around may 2015)

I have Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS.

Can anybody explain what is going on here and how can I fix it? I think the error causes snmp to abort and prevent it from updating the network interface statistics. Can I configure snmp to ignore this sys folder? Or give it permissions?

Answer 1

turned out the server was installed with a gsecurity enabled kernel andthe respective group was not enabled in grsec kernel config

i could have done that but i opted for the easy option of just installing the default server kernel via apt repositories

on ubuntu that would be apt-get install linux-image-server

dont forget to check the order of kernels in /etc/grub.d/ in my case that was cd /etc/grub.d && mv 06_OVHkernel 25_OVHkernel

now update-grub && reboot