I have few, relatively small, servers running Linux distros. Sometimes I need to re-install 1 or 2 of the "development" servers from scratch. Often I just forget to setup little things, eg. forwarding in sysctl.conf or forget to install update monitoring script, non-essential but useful packages etc.
Ideally, I would like to have exact setup among all of them.
1) How do you deal with documenting the 'deployment' process to tidy things up? Can you give me some examples?
2) Do you use some of the popular deployment tools? I've looked at stuff like chef and puppet, but they seem way over-complicated to me right now. Something simpler?