Time to learn basic for experience person?

[Stacy Olivas]

>Have a good friend that inheritted 3 FreeBSD servers. He is considering to
>change the OS because of the lack of in-house knowlege.
>
>I am thinking on offering to go to their office and show him and his team
>the basics. Their background is Novell Netware and Windows 2K.
>
>Any guestimate how much time I should ask of them? They are 4, including
>my friend; I believe they are all senior network admins.
>
>I think the first time would be just to give them a tour and show them
>where things are stored and some of the basic commands and files they
>would need to know.
>
>Tonight I could not talk much with him because he came for a a dinner
>with my wife and sister in law and they looked at me very mean when I
>talked computers... :-)   In the mean time I lent him my copy of
>the Complete FreeBSD 4th Edition.

Hmm....

What you could also do is set them up "virtual play systems" running under
vmware or Virtual PC, so once they get their feet wet they have something to
play and break on their desktop.  Then, when they wanted to try something,
they wouldn't kill the servers. :)

If the systems aren't huge, you could possibly even use a program like Ghost
4 Unix (http://rfhs8012.fh-regensburg.de/~feyrer/g4u/) and make a complete
backup copy the systems.  That way, if they are broken, they can be
restored.

Just my .2 cents

-Stacy