I very much see where every one is going here. I would hope that everyone here also sees the point I am trying to make here.

The point I make is, customization is typically NOT out of the ordinary, especially for HIGH LA machines, with tons of IO and Memory requierments. That, in fact is a norm throughout the Commercial *NIX Corporations, allowing the admins to indeed make a custom kernel for thier machine. Sure, on HP boxen, it's STILL an HP-UX kernel customized as it is (with patches from them for NEW device support via software packs on CD). On RS-6000 machine is still AIX (with APARs to support new devices). On Sparc it's still Solaris (at least for now ;) with Patches also for new devices support..

If any of you can't see my correlation between these, you and I are definately not in the same industry. Customization without documentation, is a bad thing. Customization WITH documentation is a GOOD thing.

I also tend to follow-up a "source" install of things like apache to conform to RedHat's and the LSB's way of doing things. I sym-link most everything RedHat expect to be some where to where it was actually place. Without modifying ANY logrotate configs, rc.d/init.d scripts, or things similar these machines come-up and go down JUST like a default install. The one thing I do, for most everything I do install from source rather than RPM (even though they be the same packages with same setup and such.. just to remove the "redhat" label in everything to appease some of my management) it do the "--justdb" feature of RPM. That allows me to have a dependency for Apache and all of redhat's "module packages" so when someone (being me or someone after me) tried to install an RPM that updates those dependancies it complains or at least alerts them to problems.

I really must say that I am doing a great job for the person who replaces me. I have documentation, I use TSM (or ADSM as all the docs still say) for backups and I use quality hardware with burn-in testing... I wish I had it so well when I came into this position. Person before me, never really documented much of anything except passwords... sometimes.