Back at the infrastructures.org mothership, client configuration management is described as everything that makes a host unique and/or part of a particular group or domain. And for Unix-like systems, everything pretty much comes down to configuration files, services being enabled/disabled, and cron jobs.
Hmm.
Looks like Puppet pretty much handles all of that. As long as I can describe aspects of my systems with puppet classes and modules, I’ve got reusable, consistent configurations on any servers I care to manage.