Cfengine ate my mail

[Andrew Stribblehill]

We run Cfengine across all of our servers and workstations in Durham.
One of the things it does is control the sendmail.cf file and HUP
sendmail if it changes.

To determine whether or not a host is a mail exchanger, we have:

groups:
  mxes = ( address@hidden )

However, we lost access to NIS (the core router blew up) so our MXes
forgot that's what they were and reconfigured themselves, presumably
caching the negative response in nscd. Net result: we bounced a load
of legitemate mail.

I believe that Cfengine could do better than this, by checking the
return code of setnetgrent() and (conditionally, perhaps) aborting if
it can't find the netgroup.

What do other people think?

-- 
VIKING NORTH UTSIRE
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