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

On 9/17/2010 10:14 AM, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> I know the OP asked for "cool" things to do, but I'll add my vote to
> those who suggested highlighting configuration management. I'm not
> sure how much puppet or cfengine you teach in a half-day, but I'm
> fairly confident you could cover:
>
>    1. considering configuration files to be code -- it needs to be in
>       a repository
>
>    2. setting up a Subversion or git repository and some possible ways
>       of laying out a configuration repository (per host, per service,
>       etc)
>
>    3. committing changes, recovering older configs when newer ones
>       introduce regressions
>
> Personally, I like Subversion for configuration repositories because
> (imo) sysadmins usually like having an authoritative repo rather than
> a widely branched one -- but git is on the rise and is certainly worth
> considering.

Has anyone ever standardized a way to do this that will work across more 
than a few platforms?  I've always thought there should be a way to at 
least make a subversion repository holding copies of all of /etc of all 
of your machines where similar hosts are branches from a master and 
current changes are always checked back in.  Then even if you don't use 
it to control and push changes you could at least easily view the 
changes over time on any host and the difference between any two hosts.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com