Never-never-never! use Zope, if you have any other option. It is consistently alien, totally contr-intuitive and hurt my feeling of beauty. Great example of how differently people can thinking.

Now we have 6 hardware machines and about 12 virtual machines and some routine administrative tasks became boring. The last one was raid health monitoring setup. On old installation we had cfengine, but it make (re)configuration even more troublesome. You simply can't test config updates locally before commiting this update - at random moment cfengine will rewrite your local update. Therefore we get rid of cfengine during our migration to Manchester dc. But now number of machines grow and I start searching for tool to automate configuration update propagation.

Wiki is a great tool. First I search for cfengine. It's page point me to the Comparison of open source configuration management software. At that moment page contain more, than 20 tools of this sort. Complicated choice, especially if you have no clear vision of what you need. I simply have no time to evaluate each this system. Helpfully, even short description can say a lot about the soul of product, and how it fit your own approach. Two options appears interesting for me: Puppet and Synctool.

Now it was a hard choice. Puppet is significantly more complex but it can automate more tasks. Puppet project with extended site of contemporary design, numerous community, a lot of documentation, examples, recipes and other info. It appears "serious", full-blooded and friendly. You look at it and understand - a lot of people work for you and a lot of work had been done. Good work.

But I feel evident resistance against it. And author of Synctool put my hesitates in words: "A sysadmin tool is supposed to make system administration easier, not harder.". It's right. Using some tool I want to save more time than spent to learning this tool. I choose synctool - it have so short documentation because it have really simple design and evident behavior. Isn't it a best documentation?