RHEL6 notes

Configuring a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 machine for WeBWorK

Strategy

We install the WeBWorK servers to be single-purpose servers that don't do much of anything else. We presume that shell (login) access is restricted to one or two people who are trusted and that nothing else of consequence is running on the machine. That said, we've adopted the strategy that determining what WeBWorK needs will let us backtrack to determine what needs to be installed in support of that, and that's all we install, except some system monitoring tools.

Installing RHEL 6 base system

We install using kickstart files, as that enables us to install far less at the beginning, then add what we need later. The kickstart file specifies many of the characteristics of the system, not least of which is the list of packages that get installed. This is done in the section labeled %post by listing either a package or package group to install, or one can list packages to remove from a group.

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