Chatty buggy Rug/SMT

[ajft]

1) One of our 12 OES2 test/dev servers has got rug into a mess (again,
different one this time). All twelve servers are registered with a
local SMT system, and all 12 are running OES2sp2. All twelve run
automatic nightly updates, with the cron entry

0 3 * * * root rug --quiet up -y -t patch --skip-interactive

I added the "--quiet" switch since I don't need to know every night that
12 servers didn't do anything when they didn't need to do anything!

Periodically it seems that rug gets into a mess, one of our servers
shows that a patch is available:

# rug lu -t patch
Catalog | Name ...
-------------------+---------...
SLES10-SP2-Updates | slesp2-yast2-online-update-pkg-bindings ...

The patch won't install, the server just sits for hours on end with the
message "Resolving Dependencies..." on the screen until I give up and
hit ^C.

Rug refresh won't run, for a week or more it tells me (in Poorly
Capitalised English):

ERROR: A Refresh request already Running. This Refresh is
Ignored. Please Try After Sometime.

I'm not sure how long "Sometime" is, but I've retried an hour, two hours
and a day later and nothing changes.

rug restart won't restart rug.

/etc/init.d/novell-zmd stop wont stop ZMD, it tells me that its busy.

Shutting down ZENworks Management DaemonWARNING: ZMD is currently busy
with some important activity, your request will be processed
afterwards.

Restarting the server doesn't fix it.

2) all eleven of the other servers produce a nightly "error" stating

ERROR: No actions to perform.

The cron script is "rug --quiet up -y -t patch --skip-interactive"

Why does it produce an error, rug has been told to skip interactive
patches, the only available patch is "move-to-sles10-sp3" which is an
interactive patch. Until this patch was available, the nightly run
produced no output when there were no interactive patches available, now
it wants to tell me that this is an error condition.

Novell seem to be determined to make OES as chatty and flaky as Windows,
how do I get rug to run reliably and quietly?

Adrian