[rescue] Solaris-Linux-BSD

[Steve Sandau]

dave venable wrote:
> 
> I am teaching the 4th semester of Computer Support Technology, the students
> are trained not as network administrators, instead as level 1 support folks,
> with an emphasis on printers, electrical-electronic repair, A+. My job is to
> expose them to office connectivity. It's my plan to teach about 20 hours of
> lecture-lab of some type of *nix,  and 20 hours of Novell.
> 
> By the time they get to me they will be full of winblows. I am going to
> teach a base of Network+, some Win2k Server, NT4, and basic switches and
> routers (Cisco)
> 
> In a mixed os environment, what issues relative to office connectivity are
> these folks likely to encounter? NFS? Samba? *nix print servers? windows
> unix client? Which OS should I  intro? Lab ideas?

I'd probably set up a Solaris box with Samba for students to access as a
Windows share and to telnet into, then get them to set up some type of
Linux or BSD box. I'd choose by whatever seemed the easiest for a novice
to set up. I'm not going to get lured into making much in the way of
suggestions, but Red Hat might be good if you have play machines with
large disks...

In my office, along with Windows desktops, we have Netware, Linux and
Solaris servers. Offices we connect to also have NT servers. Things
Windows users seem to need help with here include TCP/IP vs. NetBEUI,
name resolution, telnet & ftp workings. How to do things from the
command line (in Unix or Windows) is helpful. I often need to point out
(over & over) the differences between MS versions of protocols and
standard Internet versions, and the difference between DNS domains and
NT domains. I often find myself explaining connectivity (what's attached
where and why they might not be able to reach one server but can reach
another).

As far as cross-platform admin problems, passwords are always one of
them. Getting used to admin tools on different platforms is tough, and
finding monitoring and cross-platform admin tools is really helpful.
Printing is often a problem as well, but that may just be because we are
moving from Netware to Samba servers -- from IPX to TCP/IP for printing
as well as file server access.

Whew! That was a lot of rambling, maybe only some of it makes sense.
Hopefully you can find *something* useful in there...

-- 
Steve Sandau
IS Technician, TMA Bath, Maine
ssandau at bath.tmac.com