Error building nftables on Ubuntu Server 16.04.03 LTS

[J Doe]

> On Aug 19, 2017, at 4:20 PM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Try
> autoreconf -i
> then ./configure
> 
> Alternatively there is the option to install from a ppa such as
> https://launchpad.net/~jgraichen/+archive/ubuntu/nftables
> 
> Colin

Hi Colin,

Thanks for your reply.  Doing that got me a bit further.  Running autoreconf -i proceeds a bit farther before emitting an error.  If I run ./configure after that it generates the following error messages:

./configure line 3838: syntax error near unexpected token 'LIBMNL,'
./configure line 3838: 'PKG_CHECK_MODULES(LIBMNL, libmnl >= 1.0.0)'

This leads me to think that the configure script cannot locate a version of the libmnl library of version 1.0.0 or higher, but *BEFORE* running autoreconf and configure, I explicitly downloaded libmnl:

sudo apt-get install libmnl-dev

When it installs it notes a version of: 1.0.3-5, which exceeds the requirement of configure.

Thank you for the suggestion of using a PPA.  I'm a little bit hesitant about that as this is a user land tool that talks to the nftables kernel module and I am unfamiliar with that PPA.  I'm not sure if that's paranoia, but I'd also like to figure out why this doesn't build.

I did a search for nftables packages:

https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=default&section=all&arch=any&keywords=nftables&searchon=names

...and I see that artful has version 0.7-2 built.

Is there a way I can add the Artful repository and pull just this package down ?  My gut says yes as it's the same architecture (amd64), but I'm not entirely sure.

Thanks,

- J