I ran a second session of "Learning Linux for Windows Admins" at work on Friday. I dragged four Dell PowerEdge 4300 servers into our training room; one for me up front and one each for my trio of students. I made copies of the SlackWare 8 (yeah, I know it's old) installation CD and walked them through building a basic Linux server from scratch. Oh, and given that I had a Linux server hooked up to the LCD projector (meaning no PowerPoint), I whipped up a quick Perl script to give them something to look at before class.

I had two male and one female student. And, true to form, the two guys weren't listening carefully to my instructions and bitched up their installs. The one girl followed the steps to a 'T' and came out with a working server at the end of our ninety minutes. As with our first session last week, it felt really good to be teaching again. The next class will probably be a guts class where we talk about how networking works and trace the boot process.

All in all, I'm not sure if I made any converts or made all three of them think why on God's green Earth are we running this crap? At least they know that most of our server setups start with a standard image and we customize from there: they won't have to wade through all of the package selections every single time.
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In E-Rate news, I had all of my applications turned in to the consultants by the end of the day Thursday. I still need to gin up some narrative texts, but beyond that my job is now to ride herd on one of my coworkers and make sure that he gets his part done.