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

Sat Sep 18 18:51:10 UTC 2010
Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>

On Sep 17, 2010, at 3:39 AM, "Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> 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 haven't read the 80+ posts in entirety, so these might have been mentioned, but three ideas that could work:

1) RHEL for the security admin, where it goes in depth on hardening RHEL, intrusion detection and intrusion prevention.

2) RHEL for storage admins, software/hardware RAID, volume management and snapshots, NFS/CIFS network file systems, FCoE/iSCSI shared block devices.

3) RHEL for the network admin, firewalls, routers, bridges, traffic shaping, route load balancing, and network traffic monitoring.

I think these can be expanded out some more, and while there might be some overlap they should be each more targeted then a broad course.

-Ross