[agj]

I prefer bash scripting for this as well. With a small ops team, pushing for adoption of Puppet or Chef, and definitely cfengine, can be difficult. However having a backbone for running the scripts and providing reporting is a great benefit.

I used slack[1] for a short while, but then started my own configuration management framework for Perl[2]. I wanted to have templating and better reporting, and also had hopes of keeping a very slim rulesest -- forcing any extraneous functions to per-instance (bash|perl|python|.*) scripts. I need to get back to developing and testing it though.

1: http://code.google.com/p/slack/

2: http://search.cpan.org/~agj/Csistck-0.05/lib/Csistck.pm