Simulating rdist?

[va_public <yahoogroups at vikas.mailshell.com>]

rsync is great for syncing 2 directory trees, but I want to maintain 
a master source tree on one machine and copy that to multiple 
machines. i.e. basically what rdist does

The only way I can see of doing this with rsync is to have multiple 
cron jobs

0 * * * * rsync ... machine1:...
0 * * * * rsync ... machine2:...
...and so on.

Is there a more elegant/compact way of doing this?

Thanks