[Orca-users] Email warnings getting way out of hand...

[Steve Gilbert]

Hey everyone,
      I hope someone can help me with this.  I have two groups of
machines (~20 in each group) that are all running orcallator, and
the resulting percol-* files get rsync'ed over to my collector
machine that runs Orca.  There are two orca processes running on
this machine...one for each group of target machines.  Pretty much
the same deal as a lot of folks here.

      On the target machines, all the percol-* files are there,
gzip'ed except for the current day's file.  So each day one uncompressed
file gets pulled over to the master.  As a result, on the collector
machine, I have both a compressed and an uncompressed percol-* file
for each day.  I run a perl script out of cron each day that blows
away any uncompressed file that is not for the current day.

      Now, when this happens, my email gets completely bombared with
these messages...

/usr/local/orca/bin/orca: warning: file `/usr/local/orca/var/orca/orcallator/project1/blah/percol-2001-03-28' did exist and is now gone.
/usr/local/orca/bin/orca: warning: file `/usr/local/orca/var/orca/orcallator/project1/blah/percol-2001-03-27' did exist and is now gone.

...and I really mean bombarded.  All my email gets forwarded to my desktop
by our mail server, and I will get hundreds and hundreds of these messages.
My poor Sparc5 will climb up to 10 load points, and our sysadmin who
maintains the mail server is starting to send me hate mail.  I usually
end up just killing orca until the mail dies down and then brace myself
for the next onslaught.

      I don't know why this happens exactly, but all I want to do is turn
off this email...make it so that Orca never sends email again no matter
what.  I've got some scripts that monitor the general status of things, so
I'm not too worried about something going wrong, and me not catching it.
Can I just set warn_email to /dev/null or something like that?

      Also...if this happens anytime a file goes away...how is it possible
to ever get rid of old percol-* files and archive them away somewhere?
Do I just have something configured wrong?

Steve Gilbert
gilbert at cs.utk.edu