If you want to build a new server, and you're talking to someone who isn't a sysadmin, the stuff that you know is generally going to go something like this: Someone needs a server. They want one of those Linux ones, have a gopher server, and they want it blue. Several other requirements specific to them | V A miracle happens | V Really specific list of things to do to make it happen: Figure out a hostname. Allocate an IP. Put the IP in DNS. Get the right VLAN. Go to the store and get some blue paint. Get a hypervisor with enough free capacity. Put the host in the accounting system. Setup the guest. Configure the installer for the required distro. kick off the install. Add some user accounts. Setup a gopher server. Firewall the gopher server from Jeremy because he doesn't like blue (and dozens more) | V Do the stuff in the list The miracle is normally a sysadmin. She's probably also got about 50 scripts to automate the rest as well, because like any good sysadmin, her first priority was to automate herself out of a job. It will still take a while to go through and run them in the right order, but for more complicated builds, there's no one-size-fits-all script, so bits and pieces around the place will have to be set off by hand. make-magic is desiged to be the miracle. It figures out what has to be done, what order to do it in. It keeps track of which steps have been done, and makes sure that everything is done a correct right order. It can hook into systems like mudpuppy and orchestra to automate the steps themselves, the combination of which can do complex, unique builds without any human intervention. mudpuppy (a python based automation agent to do the tasks that make-magic sets it) is available at: https://github.com/anchor/mudpuppy