Those are all some good thoughts, and I have even thought of writing the utility to run from a central location and use Net::SSH::Perl to do all the checks.

But my boss wants a single script that can be used to "sanity-check" a new system. This includes basic stuff like permissions on directories, mount points, etc., and more complex stuff like SSH keys.

It is a utility script that simply prints out a report of problems found. You delete it after you fix all the issues.