httpEventCollectorToken required for HEC?

Getting Data In

I am trying configure Universal Forwarder to output to an HTTP Event Collector endpoint in Cribl. This Cribl endpoint has been configured for me and the admin has disabled the use of an authentication token. If I try to leave the httpEventCollectorToken field out or empty, I get messages like this in splunkd.log:

S2S - Authtoken is empty/size invalid, token: 
TcpOutputProc  - _isHttpOutConfigured=NOT_CONFIGURED
TcpOutputProc - LightWeightForwarder/UniversalForwarder not configured. Please configure outputs.conf.

This seems to imply Universal Forwarder will not allow me to omit the token. If I try to send data to the endpoint using curl to manually generate an HTTP POST request, it all works.

Can anyone shed light on this?

thanks,
Rob

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