I finally tried out puppet, and I like it! Its very simple to get started, and it appears to run smoothly and able to grow incrementally, which is how I like to do and learn things.

One of the turn-offs that kept me away from puppet was the custom syntax it uses, but it turns out to be pretty smart. Since they are fairly sophisticated configuration files, it would make sense to generate them in a systematic manner. On top of that, it uses common machine and network data, which can be stored in a centralized database.

I’d also like to do the same for nagios configuration files - I just setup nagios3 on debian and I like the progress its made since nagios2. I’ll have to review nagiosQL to see how they do it.