Introduction Machines tend to be specialized.
All machines are mission-critical.
Packages are good. There is a certain subset of all software at your site that should be physically present on every machine. That is, on locally mounted disk, not at the other end of any length of network. Administrators should not have to think about where to look for system configuraion information. Yes, this is usually trivial, but now there is no special context for a machine that you won't have if your assistant gets hit by a bus.