The little known, little documented kickstart installation on RedHat Linux can make your life simpler if you administer more than one linux machine, or if you administer just one that you want to be able to do 'bare metal recovery' of for mission-critical services.
The kickstart file, which by default, is a text file (ks.cfg) on a DOS-format floppy disk that is used to tell the Redhat Installation process which packages to install, how to install them, how to configure partitions and what other configuration changes to make to the system during the install. This can be done, and has been done by this author, to build many workstation computers with similar hardware and the same software configuration. It can also be used to build servers for which you want to be able to quickly re-install and re-configure quickly in the event of a disk failure, etc.
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