I was upgrading some packages last night and I broke two things, DBI and smail. I didn't find out about the mail one until the next morning (and boy, were the clients pissed...).
So, I got to thinking. Suppose we made a directory called, say, /usr/lib/healthcheck or something. Package maintainers could write a little script that tests their package for proper function and put it in that directory. Then, we could have a utility that runs periodically which would run each of those scripts in turn and alerts the sysadmin in some way if any of them indicate a problem. For example, the smail package could try sending mail to itself. The DBI package could try connecting to a test database on the system and doing a query. You get the idea. Does this tool already exist, or has someone already brought it up and it's been shitcanned? What? - Joe
