The first five minutes on any of my servers involve giving it a name, installing puppet and adding the server name to my central puppet config.
You seriously do this by hand for every server? That seems error prone and a huge waste of time when tools like puppet and chef exist.
Without Chef there would be no way for me to rollout a new server in our cluster. Investing time into Chef was one of the greatest things I ever did. Chef is the best documentation of our infrastructure. The second best tool I'm using is fpm[1] to make custom debian packages.