0.6.1 Installation instructions not working - please correct them

[marinnedea]

Hi team, the current installation steps do not work, because in Linux/Unix in general, paths should not be defined as "/path/to/file" but as /path/to/file (notice the " <-- that shouldn't be there).
Also, /usr/local/bin/ is not always writable by standard users. You should always prefix the command with sudo for this to work correctly.

Correct installation steps:

Download the installation file to /usr/local/bin/ and save it with the grr name.

sudo curl -fSL -o /usr/local/bin/grr "https://github.com/grafana/grizzly/releases/download/v0.6.1/grr-linux-amd64"

Make it executable:

sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/grr

Test it:

grr --version

---

Sample results (tested in RHEL 8.10):

$ grep "PRETTY_NAME" /etc/*release
/etc/os-release:PRETTY_NAME="Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.10 (Ootpa)"

$ sudo curl -fSL -o /usr/local/bin/grr "https://github.com/grafana/grizzly/releases/download/v0.6.1/grr-linux-amd64"
 % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0
100 29.9M  100 29.9M    0     0  18.2M      0  0:00:01  0:00:01 --:--:-- 37.8M

$ sudo ls -ltr /usr/local/bin/grr
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 31371416 Dec 23 12:56 /usr/local/bin/grr

$ sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/grr

$ sudo ls -ltr /usr/local/bin/grr
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 31371416 Dec 23 12:56 /usr/local/bin/grr

$ grr --version
2024/12/23 13:00:07 grr version v0.6.1

[malcolmholmes]

The quotes will be consumed by your shell, and the curl command will just get the filename. In what scenario are you seeing other behaviour?

[marinnedea]

hi @malcolmholmes , I ran this in RHEL 8.10 and had issues with the installation.
The steps I provided where the ones that worked without any problem.

I will try replicating and will update this with commands outputs and logs.

[marinnedea]

hi @malcolmholmes 👋

I checked and indeed the " do not break anything, actually helps in some cases; however, it's only optional here.

However, writing to /usr/local/bin/ typically requires root privileges because it is a system directory with restricted write permissions for non-root users. So sudo is needed in most cases, for both the download command via curl and for chmod command.

sudo curl -fSL -o "/usr/local/bin/grr" "https://github.com/grafana/grizzly/releases/download/v0.6.1/grr-linux-amd64"
sudo chmod a+x  "/usr/local/bin/grr"

What happens without sudo:

$ curl -fSL -o "/usr/local/bin/grr" "https://github.com/grafana/grizzly/releases/download/v0.6.1/grr-linux-amd64"
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0
Warning: Failed to create the file /usr/local/bin/grr: Permission denied
  0 29.9M    0  1369    0     0   4161      0  2:05:39 --:--:--  2:05:39  4161
curl: (23) Failed writing body (0 != 1369)

[marin@nedmar-rhel8 ~]$ sudo curl -fSL -o /usr/local/bin/grr "https://github.com/grafana/grizzly/releases/download/v0.6.1/grr-linux-amd64"
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0     0    0     0    0     0      0      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--     0
100 29.9M  100 29.9M    0     0  52.9M      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  167M

[marin@nedmar-rhel8 ~]$ chmod a+x  "/usr/local/bin/grr"
chmod: changing permissions of '/usr/local/bin/grr': Operation not permitted

[marin@nedmar-rhel8 ~]$ sudo chmod a+x  "/usr/local/bin/grr"

[marin@nedmar-rhel8 ~]$ sudo ls -ltr "/usr/local/bin/grr"
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 31371416 Dec 24 15:48 /usr/local/bin/grr

Additionally, when first configuring Grizzly, it needs to create .config/grizzly directory.

$ grr config create-context grafana-onprem
FATAL mkdir /home/marin/.config/grizzly: no such file or directory

However, .config directory doesn't exists by default. Therefore, that needs created too.
The above fails because the mkdir command needs to run with -p parameter for this to work:

mkdir  -p ~/.config/grizzly

The above seems to be related to the decision to use os.Mkdir() instead of os.MkdirAll() here.

The only details logged in logs while running the above testes are:

==> /var/log/secure <==
Dec 24 15:48:51 nedmar-rhel8 sudo[98137]:   marin : TTY=pts/0 ; PWD=/home/marin ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/curl -fSL -o /usr/local/bin/grr https://github.com/grafana/grizzly/releases/download/v0.6.1/grr-linux-amd64
Dec 24 15:48:51 nedmar-rhel8 sudo[98137]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session opened for user root by marin(uid=1002)
Dec 24 15:48:52 nedmar-rhel8 sudo[98137]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session closed for user root
Dec 24 15:50:40 nedmar-rhel8 sudo[98145]:   marin : TTY=pts/0 ; PWD=/home/marin ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/grr
Dec 24 15:50:40 nedmar-rhel8 sudo[98145]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session opened for user root by marin(uid=1002)
Dec 24 15:50:40 nedmar-rhel8 sudo[98145]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session closed for user root
Dec 24 15:51:01 nedmar-rhel8 sudo[98148]:   marin : TTY=pts/0 ; PWD=/home/marin ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/bin/ls -ltr /usr/local/bin/grr
Dec 24 15:51:01 nedmar-rhel8 sudo[98148]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session opened for user root by marin(uid=1002)
Dec 24 15:51:01 nedmar-rhel8 sudo[98148]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session closed for user root

No other log entry found - the above only shows my user running with sudo the commands, so not really helpful I guess.

As a side note, I was able to replicate the exact same behaviour on Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS, with the arm64 installer.