I recently came across an issue where I re-installed zabbix agent on a Linux machine and tried to start it up but got the following error messages:
Starting Zabbix agent: zabbix_agentd [10808]: user zabbix does not exist zabbix_agentd [10808]: cannot run as root!
It appears during the re-installation of the zabbix agent, the zabbix user account needed by the agent was not created. To workaround this, run the following commands:
groupadd zabbix
useradd -g zabbix zabbix
chown zabbix:zabbix /var/log/zabbix/
chown zabbix:zabbix /var/run/zabbix/
rm -f /var/log/zabbix/*
rm -f /var/run/zabbix/*
service zabbix-agent restart
chkconfig zabbix-agent on
This should fix the agent start-up problem.