Re: what happens when cfservd is unavailable?

[Tod Oace]

> I've got a large installation (~800 machines) running cfengine 2.0.4

Are you using SplayTime? I had trouble with cfengine clients gobbling 
up all of my servers' connections. Rather than raising the limit I 
found and used SplayTime to spread out the load. We're running cfengine 
every 30 minutes here, so I set SplayTime to 25 minutes in update.conf. 
This gives systems running on the 25th minute an ample five minutes to 
run and release locks:

control:
        !slave.!master::        SplayTime = ( 25 ) # minutes

One other problem I had was with incorrect ethernet duplex settings on 
a couple systems. Their runs weren't finishing within thirty minutes, 
and after a few days the connections were all busied up. It'd be nice 
if cfservd had a maximum connection time limit so I'd get cfengine 
email from the problem system rather than from all systems. Tons of 
warnings is better than no warnings though.

> 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.

No idea there. I started with 2.0.7p3 this past summer and haven't seen 
that problem.

>                                         Will

--
Tod Oace, Intel Corporation <tod@intel.com>