Today and yesterday I am playing with Red Hat installation program amanda, kickstart and several other tools. My current goal is to learn how to modify Red Hat installation disks in order to create customized installation CDs for our environment. Basically, it will come down to installing of all updates from the very beginnning, replacing sendmail with exim, adding mysql to SQL Server setup, and using the latest rawhide kernel with law latency patch. If I am lucky enough to fit it all on one CD, I am happy. If not, I will fill the second disk with ltsp, openoffice.org, evolution and other usefull staff.
Until now I managed to get the rough idea how the whole thing works, and build several test CDs with random changes. Currently, I am making the ISO image of the disk with all updates in place and plenty of useless things removed (like Novell and Macintosh staff). I found Burning a Red Hat CD HOWTO extremely helpful aswell as Red Hat 7 CDs mini-HowTo and Distribution Hacking 101: disecting anaconda pages.
P.S.: Almost forgot to mention two links to Unix tips and vim tips.
P.P.S.: I am also on one week vacation from tomorrow. Happy Easter!