I have made very good progress with cfengine over the last 2 days. I am now able to:

• Manage cfengine from a central location (on the cluster master)
  
• Use cfengine in the usual way to control the copying of files across the cluster
  
• Trigger daemon reloads/restarts when their configuration files change
  
• Ensure that rpm packages are installed, and install them if they are not
  

The next step is to automate the running of YAIM for worker nodes, and the installation and setup of the batch system.

I should probably have a chat with Colin Morey at Manchester to find out how he does this - share best practice!