On 9/17/10 2:39 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
(note: i asked this a few days ago but it *appears* that that post was tossed due to getting excessive bounces from my account. so i'm posting it again, apologies if you're seeing it a second time.)
over the next several weeks, i'm teaching some courses in RHEL admin but (unsurprisingly) i'll be using centos 5.5. it's a decently-written, 3rd party course, all the generic, standard admin topics but it does leave me about a 1/2 day to throw in any cool stuff i want to add.
so, any recommendations for neat things that people here have done in the way of what can be added to or configured on a centos server system? the course covers all the standard topics -- installation, package management, service management, filesystem maintenance, that sort of thing. so i'm looking for bonus, neat stuff that others here do as a matter of course when putting together a centos system.
logging utilities? intrusion detection? monitoring? anything that leaps to mind that i can use to fill up a few more hours. i'm already thinking of showing how to build and boot a new kernel. other ideas? thanks.
I'd consider the most valuable things to know about would be the nature of an assortment of 3rd party yum repositories (i.e. EPEL makes an effort not to overwrite core packages but probably won't have everything you want), how to find and install their *-release packages, how to use yum to search and install things from them, and that most of them should left disabled in the yum configuration so they don't affect things unless you explicitly enable them on the command line for a search or specific package you want.
Oh - and how to install and use freenx/NX for remote access.