I figure there's enough of a user base crossover between Cobbler, Puppet/Chef, and Func-land to make this interesting.

This is the project I've been working on for the last, well, couple of nights:   Ansible.

Introductory blog post
http://michaeldehaan.net/post/18160683912/introducing-ansible-minimal-distributed-ssh

Github (source, pull requests, issue tracker)
https://github.com/mpdehaan/ansible

Mailing list (thoughts, ideas, questions?)
http://groups.google.com/group/ansible-project

Please help spread the word, it is really early yet but I think there are a lot of places it can go.   

I've been working on the "playbook" a lot, which is more or less like a puppet module tree, or chef runbook, only 10x simpler. But I really think that it's actually enough for *most* people, assuming modules flesh out more over the next few weeks.

There are reasons why you'd pick X over Y, this is just for those who want "Y", so I'm not really interested in pulling a Charlie Sheen on any other projects.  But I know there's just times when I need something set up *yesterday* and I want something that's really simple and never going to give me trouble,
that I can explain to someone in 5 minutes.    This is that.

There are a lot of features I probably *won't* accept because the whole goal is to keep it extremely simple.   Modules, yes, we'll build up a community of those, but there are going to be certain requirements for what ship in the core, like what attributes they return and how they check errors.
Shouldn't be too complicated.   Fair warning, code review may be harsh as I have some goals for keeping this _really_ small and easy to understand.

Since this isn't about Cobbler really, this will be the last post on Ansible.   Keep replies to me or the ansible-project list please.   Again, really early, but wanted to give folks a chance to get in at the ground floor.  

Thanks!

--Michael