On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 8:54 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote: [snip] > And yes, I document everything very well! My motto is "If you aren't > spending 5% to 10% of your time documenting what you do, then neither > you nor your manager are doing their job" These are words to live and die by :D I also agree that good documentation is extremely valuable; however, I would go one further and say that when building a system, good documentation is only part of the battle. I hate to inject any PHBisms on this hallowed list, but I think one aspect of Six Sigma methodology is actually germaine to CentOS/RedHat. In particular, kickstart installation helps to reduce and even eliminate variation in the server buildout process. The problem with relying on documentation, even great documentation, is that it puts the responsibility on the admin to follow. Now we all know of the bad admins that can't follow directions, but in my experience, the culprit is often the good admin who knows another way to do something or has done it so often that he/she skips a critical but simple step or just is so busy that things get missed. So given a choice between great documentation and a good kickstart file, I'd generally prefer the kickstart. In fact, given 100 builds, I would prefer if they are all wrong in the identical way than have a perfect build document that builds a perfect server but varies from instance to instance.