I've been thinking about ways to proceed if I need to set up 5 machines with basically identical software but somewhat variable hardware. A simple approach would be to just set up my golden system and clone the disk, but the hardware differences would probably cause problems.
One approach that appeals to me is to install minimal centos on the first system, add a few rpms after installation, do my desired config file tweaks, then somehow generate an rpm that depends on all the post-install rpms and contains my custom versions of the config files I tweaked. Then, to set up the other 4 systems, I'd use the kickstart file from the first, then yum localinstall my custom rpm, which would install all the dependencies and tweak all the config files. I assume the centos install would deal with the hardware differences. Does this idea make sense? What happens when two different rpms want to provide the same config file?
Are there any other simple alternatives I have overlooked? What is the best practice when setting up identical software on multiple systems with heterogeneous hardware?
mahalo, Dave