Ah, I can follow. The wiki page on Configuration Management didn’t mention a scenario such as this, but the approach makes sense.
Fully automated configuration management is why I initially posted this feature request. I just wanted to boot a vanilla Debian install so badly so I can just run cfengine on it, which in turn would install & configure all services I expected on the gateway for me (as it’s done for ~30 hosts I administer currently).
I’ll look into the scripting solution. Thanks for the info!