The cluster config macro has had some problems, in that it can do one thing (and one thing only), normally the name, numbered in the normal style. So, in a fit of "let's make this better and trivially nestable", I cooked up a new cluster macro. It's subtly different from the old one, but configs that use the non-complicated version of the old one should work identically under the new one. (cluster (<fmt-string> <low> <high> &key c-fmt name counter) <stanza to be repeated>) :name <name> specifys a symbol to be replaced, instead of the default NAME :c-fmt decides if a conversion from C-style format to lisp style format should happen (still defaults to true, but by happy co-incidence, the ~-style lisp arguments are NOT mangled by the C-style conversion, strictly speaking a bug, but maybe not worth fixing at the moment) :counter is NEW, this specifies a counter to be sequentially set from low to high in the expansion. This defaults to a gensym, so cannot be used without specifying it. (with-format ((sym1 fmt1 vars1... ) (sym2 fmt2 vars2 ...)) <config stanza>) Like LET, only, eh, thing... I also cooked up an example (in test-files/nested-cluster.cfg): (cluster ("" 1 2 :counter a) (cluster ("" 1 2 :counter b) (with-format ((name "node~d-cpu~d" a b) (ip-addr "172.23.~d.~d" a b)) (machine name linux-host (user "testuser") (ip ip-addr))))) Somewhat annoyingly, when I test-ran this I noticed that our post-creation clean-up for EQUIPMENT objects is a bit... aggressive. When created from a config stanza, the ONLY thing specified is the name, all else is (eventually) done with (setf *config-object* 'slot-to-set <value>) or pushing things onto the monitor list, as it were. While the clean-up done in the initialize-after method is good, I am wondering if it may be worth creating a new "post-config-cleanup" GF and move the relevant clean-up bits to there, as I actually had to re-define the :after method t do nothing to be able to run my tests (it's vastly easier to use example names to see if things work or not, when one doesn't actually have a cluster at hand). //Ingvar