Edge Agent Upgrade Fails with "Permission Denied"

Symptom

Upgrading the Edge agent from the Xyte portal fails — the upgrade command ends with an Error status, and the command output / agent logs show:

/usr/lib/zabbix/externalscripts/update.sh: line 22: can't create /xyte/edge_data/to_wrapper/update_request.txt: Permission denied
Update Requested to: 1.3.4

(The target version in the log will match whatever version you attempted to upgrade to.)

Cause

The upgrade script writes an update request file into the shared directory /xyte/edge_data/to_wrapper inside the Edge container. On some installations these shared directories lose their expected group ownership — they should be owned by group dockeraccess (GID 2001).

Note that checking permissions alone can be misleading: the directories may still show 770, which looks correct. The giveaway is the ownership column showing UNKNOWN:UNKNOWN instead of root:dockeraccess. With 770 permissions and no valid group, the update script has no write access and cannot create update_request.txt.

Diagnose

On the machine or VM running the Edge Agent, check ownership and permissions of the shared directories:

docker exec xyte_edge stat -c "%U:%G %a %n" /xyte /xyte/edge_data /xyte/edge_data/to_wrapper

Healthy output looks like:

root:dockeraccess 770 /xyte
root:dockeraccess 770 /xyte/edge_data
root:dockeraccess 770 /xyte/edge_data/to_wrapper

If any line shows UNKNOWN:UNKNOWN, the group ownership was lost and the upgrade will fail with the error above.

📘

Commands inside the xyte_edge container run as root already — there is no sudo and no zabbix user in that container, so run the commands exactly as shown from the host.

Fix

Run this on the host:

docker exec xyte_edge sh -c 'chown -R :2001 /xyte/edge_data && chmod 770 /xyte/edge_data /xyte/edge_data/to_wrapper /xyte/edge_data/errors'

Verify:

docker exec xyte_edge stat -c "%U:%G %a %n" /xyte/edge_data /xyte/edge_data/to_wrapper

Both lines should now show group dockeraccess with 770. Then retry the Edge agent upgrade from the Xyte portal — it should complete successfully.

Related setup guide

🔗

Make sure the Docker post-installation steps were completed on the machine: Ubuntu/Debian Installation Guide — Docker post-installation steps