Looks promising! Tnx!

How can you steal a free software?

Anyway, what are the pros of Cfengine compared to Puppet, in your opinion?

I = if

Do you know I one can add a new host for monitoring to openNMS via some sort of API?

I find LDAP more useful for storing data about "end-user" of our systems, like usernames, email accouts, quota data and such, and not that much useful for storing the actual server configurations. But there could be something to it...

Do you log into the machine to emerge? Look at puppet for that...

Nope, a Slackware user, and on those servers I manage every software that interacts with external world (clients) is compiled from source as well as all the required libraries. But hey, I might be getting lazy just by not posting this from some Slackware shell telnet client, but from - you have guessed it - Ubuntu :)

"Brings them in configuration..."

For monitoring? Or for other things also, like configuration management?

And if the servers are of more heterogenic nature and/or distributed across multiple datacenters?

Can't boot to same image, servers are collocated at different providers. For configuration management I find puppet working quite reliably and it does notify me about failed scripts/installations. And I prefer restarting only services, not whole servers, unless really necessary. When I get to deploy a new server, the workflow I would like to achieve goes like this: 1. I input all the relevant data (MAC/IP/mounts/purpose/misc) into some sort of application, via browser (or API for larger installs) 2. This application then creates necessary config files for: - PXE boot server (which does initial install of the bare OS with functional puppet), - puppetmaster (which completes the installation and creates a fully functional server by compiling packages) or whatever configuration management SW, - Nagios (or whatever monitoring software) - Ganglia (or whatever performance metrics software) 3. I just power up the machine and all the work gets done automatically, The sysadmin's job should not primarily consist of repeating items from step #2 mentioned above, and those unnecessary steps are what I am trying to avoid. I still have to create templates for all the above stuff, but that is the fun part anyway.

Do you use server-push or client-pull method?

I am a sysadmin and all I would like is to spare some time by eliminating unnecessary typing/programming/scripting and rather spend it on evaluating, testing, heck, even thinking.

Nope, it hasn't. But I did ask the question in the first place to check if I was missing something. Scripting is fun, love it, but doing everything from scratch (althought I am fan of it, as it gives me the knowledge and total control) is a bit time-consuming. So, if there is a simple software with nice web and API interface for this, and with the ability to create custom scripts which do the actual work, I would like to know about it.