Ubuntu Couldn't find your SSL library files for Monit

DevOps is I would argue used by many people in wrong terms nowadays (more on this in upcoming posts but be aware of the hype). In reality the Ops in the equation (meaning the sysadmin) should strive for identical Servers. Management through Recipes is the way to go, however many feel like a sysadmin should not code and that is wrong. The sysadmin should have nothing to do (probably) with OOP but with scripting and automation, that should be part of their daily work.

Today we got a weird error in one of the Ubuntu Servers. Monit would not install from the POB Recipe we have been using successfully, but instead fail with the below error:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/sbin --bindir=/usr/sbin --sysconfdir=/etc/monit/ 
...
checking for static SSL support... disabled
checking for SSL support... enabled
checking for SSL include directory... /usr/include
checking for SSL library directory... Not found

Couldn't find your SSL library files.
Use --with-ssl-lib-dir option to fix this problem or disable the
SSL support with --without-ssl
...

The only explanation for these inconsistencies is actually not managing the servers through recipes. With time the manual actions done in certain servers are different than in others.

Here is how we solved it in case someone else is having a similar error:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/sbin --bindir=/usr/sbin --sysconfdir=/etc/monit/ --with-ssl-lib-dir=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
...
checking for static SSL support... disabled
checking for SSL support... enabled
checking for SSL include directory... /usr/include
checking for SSL library directory... /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
...

So try to keep your actions as sysadmin versioned in scripts which at the same time access versioned configurations. Then deploy always from scripts/recipes to have consistent environments.