Re: "tidy" not deleting files from the future

[Mark Burgess]

Agreed. Patch is on svn 

http://svn.iu.hio.no/viewcvs/trunk/src/tidy.c?rev=163&r1=62&r2=163

M

On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 15:48 -0600, Paul Krizak wrote:
> Occasionally we install a system that has the hardware clock slightly 
> out of sync.  In the case where the clock is ahead of the "real" time, 
> "tidy" seems to break.  The tidy section looks like this:
> 
> tidy:
> 
> # Remove extraneous network configuration scripts
> net::
>      /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts pattern=ifcfg-eth1 age=0 recurse=0
>      /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts pattern=ifcfg-eth2 age=0 recurse=0
>      /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts pattern=ifcfg-eth3 age=0 recurse=0
>      /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts pattern=ifcfg-eth4 age=0 recurse=0
> 
>      # Remove securetty to allow root logins
>      /etc pattern=securetty age=0 recurse=0
> 
> 
> When run on these machines that have the system clock off (note that 
> since it's a fresh install, *all* files on the disk have 
> atime/mtime/ctime's that are in the future by a few minutes) cfengine 
> generates messages like this:
> 
> cfengine:modi010: ALERT: atime for /etc/securetty is in the future. 
> Check system clock!
> 
> And the file doesn't get deleted.  This then screws up the machine in an 
> obscure way that is specific to our installation procedures and beyond 
> the scope of this e-mail.  Thus "Just wait until the next time cfengine 
> runs and it'll get deleted" is not an acceptable solution.
> 
> Is there some way to tell cfengine, "Irregardless of anything about the 
> file except for its existence, please delete this file"?  I don't see 
> anything like a "force" in the documentation.
>