Agent .deb package broken for Debian after update to 2.3

Troubleshooting
1

CMK version: CRE 2.3.0p1
OS version: Debian 12 Bookworm x86_64

Error message:
I’ve been trying to install agent on a new host:
root@debianhost:~# dpkg --install ./check-mk-agent_2.3.0p1-1_all.deb
dpkg-deb: error: ‘./check-mk-agent_2.3.0p1-1_all.deb’ is not a Debian format archive
dpkg: error processing archive ./check-mk-agent_2.3.0p1-1_all.deb (–install):
dpkg-deb --control subprocess returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
./check-mk-agent_2.3.0p1-1_all.deb
root@debianhost:~# apt -y install ./check-mk-agent_2.3.0p1-1_all.deb
Reading package lists… Error!
E: Invalid archive signature
E: Internal error, could not locate member control.tar{.zst,.lz4,.gz,.xz,.bz2,.lzma,}
E: Could not read meta data from /root/check-mk-agent_2.3.0p1-1_all.deb
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

This seems to be specific to Debian (I’ve tried multiple hosts) - on Ubuntu, it has tested as compatible for me. Before 2.3, I never saw this issue, so it seems introduced?

2

Looks like this is not really a .deb package. Probably a corrupted file. From where and how did you download it? Sure there haven’t been any transmission errors?

1 Like
3

Hi, It comes from checkmk itself (Setup → Agents → Linux):

https://checkmk.example.com/mysite/check_mk/agents/check-mk-agent_2.3.0p1-1_all.deb

and like I noted, it works on Ubuntu. Just not on regular Debian (12, but I also tested a host still on 11 by now)

I’m pretty sure there were no transmission errors because I tested this several times, and it has been very consistent (Ubuntu works, Debian always doesn’t)

4

Turns out… there have been transmission errors after all. It seems to come down to debian’s curl (but both Bullseye’s and Bookworm’s, but not Ubuntu Jammy which is in the middle of them in terms of raw version numbers) handling a redirect caused by an unrelated change differently than Ubuntu or rpm distros I tried, so I ended up downloading error 302 Found web documents. :person_facepalming: Which I didn’t even hold possible since the command line interface showed no error or inconvenience whatsoever. Apparently and somewhat bafflingly, curl -OJ will download even a 404 page without returning an error.
Not actually related to 2.3.