this kind of behavior. I have some encrypted filesystems that I would like to manage with puppet, they require manual passphrase intervention, so I cannot manage the actual mounting of those filesystems with puppet (nor do I want to), but I would like those filesystems to appear in the fstab and be available as a pre-requisite for various other file types. I would like to be able to do something like this: mount { "/crypt": ensure => exists; } file { "/crypt/secretstuff": ensure => directory, require => Mount["/crypt"]; } if /crypt is mounted then the file type requirement is satisfied and it will do its things, if its not mounted then the pre-requirement dependency fails. Is there a way to do this that I am overlooking, or does the mount type need an additional ensure behavior? Micah