here's something I made for it. I have to control about 320 Workers(160 Machines, GPU + CPU miners, all miners need different user/pw with my pool):
I therefore use a live usb drive that just copies itself into ram(so I can remove the thumb drive) and gets everything started automatically. Here's the init script
/etc/init.d/miner:
what it does... it first tests if another startup has been done before. If so, exits.
then it sets up networking to get an internet connectoin.
after that, it will request user and password from a web interface. All my miner credentials are stored in a database and assigned by ip, as my hosts are having static ip's towards the internet. after getting the credentials, the poweroff daemon is started. I'll get to that later. ul386 is actually nothing to worry about, its just another project of mine.
Well, now comes the juicy part: launch ufasoft miner on all cpu cores(itech = ufasoft cpu miner), send to background.
After that, it will start rpcminer(CUDA miner, the cards in my machines are nvidia).
now the power script
/usr/bin/power.sh:
this one is pretty nice. the getst.php script will contain a time in date +%H:%M format, and until this time is reached, it will do nothing. after that it shuts down the machines. I do that because the room where those machines are in gets pretty heated, so I usually shutdown all the machines 2 hrs before they are used again(they power up automagically) for the air condition to cool down the room. Also I can set the time getst returns remotely.
All of this is packed into a 320MB Live-Thumbdrive, and it has an option to boot from cdrom, as a few of my machines refuse to boot from usb.
All in all, it's just plugging in, letting it boot, remove thumbdrive, go away.
I could also upload the thing if anyone's interested ( donations are also always welcome )