I made a mirror, was shocked at the size, then dug into where all the disk space was going. Stuff I'd never use, single App distros that were >100mb, apps for platforms I'd never use, ridiculous, insecure crap nobody should use.

I followed your link out of curiosity, and FullAuto doesn’t seem bad to me. Orchestrating dozens of servers can be a pain. I usually just use .ssh/authorized_keys but it does have a connection overhead on every single remote command I run. I get around that by putting scripts on the remote host so that I’m only making a few ssh calls and the remote scripts do the lifting. FullAuto looks like a reasonable alternative design.

How closely did you look? It's a disaster. Rex is a sane alternative.

so you are manually maintaining a blacklist of distros?

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}