Strange behavioural differences when invoking cfengine through cfrun

[Eric Dorland]

Hello,

I'm attempting to roll out cfengine to a bunch of our servers (and more
to come). I'm finally grokking everything, but I've run into one last
problem I can't seem to solve. I've got a setup with all my master files
are in a CVS repository. Cfagent pulls the files out of cvs whenever it
updates. I also have a script to run cfrun everytime I commit something
to the CVS repo. 

My problem is that cfagent is behaving differently when invoked from
cfrun than it's periodic runs from cfexecd. The periodic runs through
cfexecd work great. When I invoke cfrun however, the "packages" target
doesn't work. I have cfengine check to see if the ntp package is
installed. If it isn't it installs it using up2date. I know the ntp
package is installed, but whenever I invoke cfagent through cfrun the
packages target says it's not installed. When run through cfexecd
everything works as expected.

I hope that was clear. I'm running the latest 2.1.13 on RHEL3. Has
anyone seen a similar problem? (Googling didn't come up with anything
similar). Let me know any debugging output I could provide that would be
helpful. Thanks.

-- 
Eric Dorland
eric.dorland@mcgill.ca
WSG
514.398-5023 ext. 09562