Eh, what kind of cluster? High available cluster? Load balancing cluster? Distributed computing cluster? Which vendor? What OS? How many nodes? How many packages?

I've experience with SUN Cluster, HP Serviceguard, and Veritas cluster. They all have the ability to insert hooks if a package fails, or switches to a different node. At least part of Veritas cluster is written in Perl. 2 years ago, I was following a training at Veritas about their cluster. At one moment, we had a conversation like this:

Coworker: Hey, there are pre- and post-hooks if a package comes up, and there's a post-hook for if a package goes down, but no pre-hook for a package going down.
Me: Hmmmm, this is a Perl program. vi whatever.pl.
Trainer: Yeah, that is indeed annoying. I've encountered that limitation in the field myself as well.
Me: clickety-click
Trainer: I put in a feature request quite some time ago.
Me: :wq. There, now we have all four hooks.
Trainer (gets floppy from his bag): Can I have that?

The power of Perl....

Abigail