Transfer files and run commands to/on remote servers, are there light weight tools

Question

I tried synctool, it can run simple command on remote "nodes", such as "date", "hostname". But it failed to sync itself ("masterdir") to nodes/host.

$synctool
...... can not mkdir on node1 ... or something ...

Beside "puppet, chef", is there any light weight tools to do the job? Simply basic configuration managements, transfer files, and remote commands execution.

There is a perl tool "LCFG", but I can not find any thing about it here.

Answer 1

Why not just use standard SSH/sftp?