[CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

Sat Sep 18 15:16:14 UTC 2010
Eduardo Grosclaude <eduardo.grosclaude at gmail.com>

On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 10:11 AM, Robert P. J. Day
<rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Sep 2010, Eduardo Grosclaude wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Sep 18, 2010 at 5:06 AM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca> wrote:
>>
>> > p.s.  one stupendously trivial idea i had was to give each student
>> > a cheap USB drive and use that as the vehicle for playing with
>> > filesystem utilities.  with an $8 2G drive, i can demonstrate
>> > concepts like hotplugging, udev, LVM and so on, knowing i'll never
>> > risk the contents of the hard drive.
>>
>> That reminds me of a sysadmin course where we set up minimal,
>> console-only QEMU virtual machines with two virtual disks, and
>> taught fdisk, mkfs, RAID, LVM and the like.
>
>  interesting ... is this course publicly available?  be fun to take a
> look at it.

The course materials were just the labs, along with succinct syntax
notes. Exercises were just "partition that drive according to the
following criteria", "create a PV/VG/LV that size", "build a level 1
RAID volume", "declare that RAID component invalid", that sort of
things. Theory was kept at a minimum and was orally exposed.

When managing educational efforts, I have encouraged instructors to
concentrate in hands-on training, write minimal labs guides, and take
the "Internet is already filled with info" approach wrt other docs. Of
course, guidance was given about where and what to read: look for docs
from your distro, learn to know when docs are out of date, etc.

My experience is that non-academia students, while enthusiastic, lack
studying muscle, and handouts you throw at them are seldom read or
understood. Face-to-face is different; that's the place where your
theory should go.

However, they can build up a practical understanding of the task they
must accomplish, so they can attempt to read documentation later. The
labs should pull the theory, while University does the other way
around. I found out this while being an instructor for Cisco CCNA
program -- it wasn't an easy switch.

-- 
Eduardo Grosclaude
Universidad Nacional del Comahue
Neuquen, Argentina