I’ve started using Puppet at last. I first heard of it a good three years ago (I reckon), but didn’t believe it was suitable for my then environment. This of course was wrong, it’s pretty good for any environment. I’d come to understand this when I asked one of my team a year or so later to spend a week doing nothing at all other than looking into Puppet. I wish I’d called him out when he declared it too difficult to implement “because it required a separate server”. I’ve now started putting Puppet into production and have the luxury of knowing I can get a LDAP server in place and providing LDAP services to my Department from bare metal in under ten minutes (depending on machine performance of course). I started with the real basics (distributing autofs files), moved on to a basic service (OMD – basically a nagios-type service), and will next get DHCP working (easy) and will work on Apache (not too bad) and Plone (could be horrendous) later. All in all, Puppet is wonderful, and a must for any *nix sysadmin who wants to save time and effort.