No reliable outputs in 2.1.15 ?

[David Masterson]

I've begun setting up a CFEngine environment here.  I've installed cfengine
from RPMs off of Dag Wieers site and that got cfservd, cfenvd, and cfexecd
running on the systems at bootup.  I've configured a simple update.conf to
copy cfagent.conf and update.conf from the remote master directory to the
local "inputs" directory.  I have "force=true" in the copy and I see the copy
happening at hourly intervals (the timestamps on the files are updated and
.cfsaved files are created).  However, *most* of the time, I do not see a log
file being created in the "outputs" directory.  So, my questions are:

*       What is the "previous" link in the "outputs" directory?  What creates
it?  For what reason?  Why would it be removed or *not* created?
*       Assuming copies are happening, shouldn't output be created in the
"outputs" directory?  Is the daemons running incorrectly?
*       Should I abandon the RPMs and build cfengine from scratch?  Is there
reasons for building on a system from scratch?
*       Where in the documentation is the "outputs" directory discussed and
when output is created?  What about email to sysadm?

The following is my update.conf:

control:
    actionsequence = ( copy )
    domain = ( vmware.com )
    policyhost = ( cfengine.eng.vmware.com )

    master_cfinput = ( /home/cfengine/master/config/cfengine/inputs )
    local_cfinput = ( /var/cfengine/inputs )

copy:
    $(master_cfinput)           dest=$(local_cfinput)
                                recurse=inf
                                mode=600
                                owner=root
                                group=root
                                server=$(policyhost)
                                trustkey=true
                                ignore=CVS

-- 
David Masterson
VMware, Inc.
Palo Alto, CA