We're An American Band

More fallout today from Saturday's power outage: two workstations that failed to boot up (BIOS checksum error for one of 'em, which is a new one for me), some NIS-related services that didn't get started properly (not sure what's going on there), and so on. Plus the return of the where-are-those-seven-machines? that didn't get done on Friday because of all of this.

But I did learn some stuff about Cfengine. For example, if you have something like:

my_url = ( http://www.example.com/foo/bar )

then you'd better precede it with:

split = ( "+" )

or some other character that isn't used. The colon is treated as a list separator by default, which means that later on, when you try and do something like:

shell::
    linux.need_some_file:
        "/bin/wget $(my_url)/baz"

what it'll actually do is this:

/bin/wget http/baz
/bin/wget //www.example.com/foo/bar/baz

'cos it's iterating over the two lists, see?

And SuSE's dhcp client, by default (I think), will change /etc/yp.conf without telling you, and then on exit put back the old version (saved conveniently at /etc/yp.conf.sv. It took me a long time to figure out that this was happening, and it pissed me off mightily. /etc/resolv.conf is filled with comments when the dhcp client modifies it -- hell, they even throw in the PID. So why not do that with yp.conf? At least you can turn it off by changing DHCLIENT_MODIFY_NIS_CONF in /etc/sysconfig/networking/dhcp.