With (R)?ex you can manage all your boxes from a central point through the complete process of configuration management and software deployment.

A small example:

set user => "root";
set password => "root";
set -passauth;

group frontend => "frontend[01..09]", "varnish[01..04]";

desc "Show Unix version";
task "uname", group => "frontend", sub {
    say run "uname -a";
};

desc "Install needed packages and configurations";
task "prepare", group => "frontend", sub {
   install "apache2";
   install "mysql-server";
    
   file "/path/on/the/remote/machine",
      content => "Hello World!",
      mode    => 600,
      owner   => "root",
      group   => "root";
};

• Run commands directly from command line

  bash# rex -e 'say run "uptime";' -H "frontend[01..10] middleware[01..05]" -u root -p password

• List all known Tasks

  bash# rex -T
  Tasks
    uname                     Show Unix version

• Run Task uname

  bash# rex uname
  Running task: uname
  Connecting to server1 (root)
  Linux mango 2.6.27-openvz-briullov.1-r4 #1 SMP Tue Nov 24 23:25:52 CET 2009 x86_64 Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
  Running task: uname
  Connecting to server2 (root)
  Linux debian01 2.6.26-2-amd64 #1 SMP Tue Aug 31 09:11:22 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux