the contrib tools are based on replica and in my experience that makes them slow and fragile. You might want to give the 9pm stuff I did a try. It works,it's far faster, and they're trivial shell scripts that are easy to understand. Simple example, installing openssh is about 50 times faster -- minutes vs. hours -- using 9pm.
Ah blast 9grid.net went away, I will get the guys to go kick it. ron
