How about a system health-monitoring tool

["Joe Emenaker" <jemenake@genesiscom.com>]

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