local.tex file

I saw in a book or on a website somewhere that the system adminstrator should create a local.tex file whenever LaTeX is installed. I was wondering if there is a boilerplate or template file to guide me in creating the local.tex file? I couldn't find any local.tex file after unpacking the tetex distribution.

Also, I was wondering why there are no Russian hyphenation files included (even if commented out) in the texmf/source/latex/local/language.dat file?

Thanks