Linode rocks. Seriously, read my review. I was talking to a co-worker (whom I converted to Linode as well) about how I would pay double the amount to keep my Linode now that I know how much I use it. Don't tell them that, they're cheap :) If you find this article helpful (or my article about moving VM's to and from Linode), please consider clicking one of the links in this article to sign up for a Linode - if you sign up for 90 days, I'll get $20 credited to my account.
I was setting up a second Linode that was to be a testing ground for some StackScripts I'm working on. The new Linode will eventually replace my existing one. For whatever reason, the most recent version of CentOS they had available was 5.3. Not a big deal, I can 'yum upgrade' up to 5.4 after installation. Well, after doing so, I found that a lot of features that I wanted had been stripped out. In Linode's defense, it's in their best interest to offer very stripped down images for their customers. The one feature I wanted that I couldn't get enabled was SELinux, and simply installing the packages still wouldn't let me use 'setenforce 1' to get it turned on. My best guess as to why is that the Linode kernel didn't support it, but I honestly didn't troubleshoot it too much. I really wanted root LVM capabilities as well, so I decided that a full-on anaconda based installation was the way to go. Plus, I couldn't find anything in the forums about it, so there was the lure of being the first to do it ;-)
Well, thanks to the flexibility offered by Linode, not only can you do a anaconda-based installation (with optional Kickstart), but you can do so using the GUI over VNC if you're so inclined!
Just got my test results back -- I got 100% on my exam, so now I'm a RHCE!
Today in class we were talking about how you needed to save your iptables changes using service iptables save before rebooting at the end of the test, or else you'll fail that section of the test. I brought up the setting IPTABLES_SAVE_ON_STOP to "yes" in /etc/sysconfig/iptables-config, and no one else knew about that file. There's some pretty cool settings in there - read on for details.