what happens when cfservd is unavailable?

[Will Lowe]

I've got a large installation (~800 machines) running cfengine 2.0.4
on Debian woody.  I'm working on upgrading to 2.0.8 but it'll be a
while.  We run cfengine hourly via cron on every server --- it's
been a lifesaver.

The box I'm running cfservd on is so overloaded at this point that
cfservd just dies a lot and we have to restart it.  I've got bigger
hardware on order for it, but it'll be about a week ... for now we
just restart it when it dies and life goes on.

But whenever it happens some of the clients have issues -- it looks,
in fact, as though the stanza in my update.conf that updates the
cfengine configs on each client decides that since cfservd isn't
running it should *DELETE* the configs from the client side.

Here's the stanza:

        $(globalsrc)/etc/cfengine
            dest=/var/lib/cfengine2/inputs
            recurse=inf
            owner=root
            group=root
            mode=og-w
            timestamps=keep
            type=checksum
            purge=true
            server=cfserver.my.domain.com

any ideas?

-- 
                                        thanks,
                
                                        Will