[CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i'm not ignoring all of the suggestions so far (i'm taking note of
all of them) but as rp herrold suggests, a lot of this is getting
pretty far afield, so let me drag this back on-topic.

  i'm looking for cool things that can be added into a very generic
5-day course in basic RHEL (centos) administration that wouldn't
normally be covered.  i've provided the outline on which the 3rd party
courseware is based -- it was written to mimic red hat's RH 131
course:

https://www.redhat.com/courses/rh131_red_hat_linux_system_administration/

so you can see what's already there, and i'm after cool tips, tricks
and utilities that people who are long-time RHEL/centos admins have
learned that they think are terrifically useful that i can sneak in as
bonus content.

  the caveat is that i don't want to add topics that would take longer
than, say, a half day since i can always take a topic like that,
extend it to a full-day course, and market it *separately*.

  case in point:  virtualization.  the course already covers
virtualization *very* briefly and i don't want to make that section
any longer since i can easily see having a full-day course on that
topic.

  *possibly* the same thing with puppet or cfengine (both excellent
suggestions).  i'm thinking of at least demoing one or both and,
depending on the interest, perhaps suggesting a full day course in
enterprise-wide administration.

  anyway, i appreciate all of the ideas so far, and i'm definitely
going to use some of them.  thanks muchly.

rday

p.s.  one stupendously trivial idea i had was to give each student a
cheap USB drive and use that as the vehicle for playing with
filesystem utilities.  with an $8 2G drive, i can demonstrate concepts
like hotplugging, udev, LVM and so on, knowing i'll never risk the
contents of the hard drive.

-- 

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Top-notch, inexpensive online Linux/OSS/kernel courses
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
========================================================================