i've been meaning to set up my machines to do such useful things as mailing me when disk self testing fails, or when swraid kicks out a disk. i've been putting it off since i have 4 or 5 machines that i'd need to set it up on, and really i should be using some tool.

this weekend i finally got around to playing with genders, a tool which is used at the labs' clusters. it has some interesting failure modes. for example, the syntax for installing some file in /etc/ is:

87kyum: 87k/yum.conf -> ${attr_all} install /etc/yum.conf;

there's also a syntax for installing multiple files to a directory:

87kOPENLDAP = ( openldap/ldap.conf openldap/cancerclam-ca.pem ) 87kopenldap: ${87kOPENLDAP} -> ${attr_all} install /etc;

FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING HOLY DO NOT GET THESE TWO MIXED UP!

If you accidentally do something like this (which seems reasonable, considering cp's semantics, and the above syntaxes):

87knsswitch: 87k/nsswitch.conf -> ${attr_all} install /etc;

then you lose, and have to reinstall, since all of /etc/ was removed and you now have a file named /etc which looks shockingly like what you might want to find in /etc/nsswitch.conf.

let the rdist drinking gamess begin!

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