Is there a way to remotely install universal forwarders using a command line push that would allow multiple intermediate forwarders listed, but the UF would only send to the intermediate forwarder that is available? (We have a very segmented network, with many Intermediate forwarders, and would like to automatic push configs to about 1000 servers.)
Yes there is, below is a link to the CLI docs. I use a script to install our UF's and set the basics. The rest of the configs is then downloaded from our delivery server. You can add multiple forward-servers and the UF will round-robin them.
http://docs.splunk.com/Documentation/Splunk/6.2.1/Forwarding/SupportedCLIcommands