Re:radmind (Score 2, Informative)

A previous poster argued that you have to choose between unix-ey freeware and pricey, pointy-clicky commercial software, but radmind actually bridges that gap nicely. It is a free set of unix command-line utilites with several GUI applications that can bind it together on the client and server sides -- if you like that sort of thing. In my implementation, we use perl scripts to actually do most of the heavy lifting. Moreover, it's relatively to give end users more-or-less control over the rest of the system: you want a lab computer? Radmind can do that. You want a user's workstation? Radmind can do that too.

Radmind is effectively a tripwire: it builds transcripts about what has changed on the system and can either capture those changes as a package or apply changes to restore (or setup) a system to a known state.

The only downside of radmind is that to use it effectively, you really need in-depth knowledge about the MacOS. In order to build transcripts, you need to know which of the changed things are meaningful and which are noise. You need to understand how packages have the potential to create dependencies and conflict with one another -- and to make sure the packages get applied in the right order.