I'm a firm believer that temporary solutions become permanent very quickly however this quote from mySQL DBA is by far the best way of putting it.

Remember kids

There is nothing more Permanent then a temporary solution

There are a number of tools sysadmins should be looking at in order to make their life less hellish when it comes to configuration management.

Some tools that I have found so far are:

• cfengine
• Puppet
• Bcfg2