automation

reviewed puppet and cfengine again, I'm not satisfied with how well it matches what I want to do.  Perhaps I don't understand the problem well....

Looking for Perl modules to help out on managing the packages, and not finding anything that looks good.  Many rpm modules are out of date, and the rpm2 module does not look useful for what I want.  So, Plan B is to just use system.

reboot

the lab machines are hanging on reboot, trying to fix

- tried adding flag to kernel bios=reboot|acpi, but neither helps
- it seems to reboot ok sometimes
- going through messages to get rid of warnings,
   - uninstalling openvm-tools
   - cleaned up fstab a bit, still having problems with double mounting /usr/local over nfs
   - changed the kernel options to bios=reboot

It seems better, but I'm not real satisfied, I'll have to test it more.  The bios=reboot was not working reliably before...