I've been managing 20-30~ cPanel based hosts over the past year with Puppet, Nagios and Munin for general monitoring / trending however a lot of the methods I've had to use to deploy / manage things such as configurations a pain.

For those of you who aren't familiar with cPanel - it adds a few things to yum exclude such as perl*, ruby* and so forth. This causes issues with me being able to bootstrap monitoring on a new server via Puppet (well via the Package type) due to a bunch of conflicts with installing via Yum.

Now I could create a custom RPM for everything and remove certain dependencies from the spec file however I would like to avoid this if possible. Does anyone have any proposed functional ways to manage this sort of environment?

Currently I install Puppet, Facter and Munin via RPM's and force install using --nodeps and such (since they're installed, just no the ones Yum wants). Nagios I installed manually from source at this time (likely will create RPM's however I want to tackle this general issue first).