I'll probably dig into that today, since my brain was busy half the night composing it.

I've done about four others so far (on DNS, e-mail, Webmin and SSL/SSH). They're written to give you just enough theory so you can toss together a working implementation and then point you to where you can learn more. The Webmin tutorial is the first in the series as I can later show the way

The HOWTOs are good, but are a little overwhelming to my students. I got started on them due to a class project that I gave my UNIX sysadmin class last term. Here's the description, straight out of the hand-out:

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Each team will produce one client and two servers:
The client will be a dual boot Red Hat 7.0/Windows 2K Pro. Equivalent functionality should be available to the user regardless of which OS they are using. You will create at least two user IDs for demonstration purposes with documentation on a procedure for adding additional users. (For extra credit, you can have authentication handled by a network server.) Both clients will have the following minimal functionality:
- Office Suite (StarOffice 5.2..see below)
- E-mail client
- Web browser (your choice)

NOTE: The Web browser should be installed in a common directory so all users can access it, not installed in individual home directories.

The servers will have the following functionality:
NFS/Samba - This will provide file services for both the Linux and Windows clients. At minimum, the user should be mounting their home directory from the network.

Print services - You have a choice between using lpd, lprng and CUPS. The client should be able to print through the server from both Win2K and Linux.

StarOffice - You should use version 5.2 but it must be installed on the network and both Windows and Linux versions should be available to the client. (That is, a full install on the client is not allowed. SO must be set up to run off of the network.)

Apache - The minimum requirement here is a main page (accessed by the URL http://<server>) and consisting of something other than the Apache test page and a personal user page (accessed by the URL http://<server>/~<userid>). In addition, at least one 'secure' page (using SSL) should be created and available.

Name Resolution - The minimum here will be a DNS subdomain off of the school domain. (For extra credit you could set up NIS for name resolution.)

SSH/SSH - Telnet and ftp should be disabled on both the client and the servers and access should be only through ssh and utilities like scp.

NTP - One of the servers should be a network time server and the other two machines will be set as NTP clients.(This is now an optional, extra credit item)

E-mail - One of the servers should be set up as a POP server, with e-mail accessible from both the Windows and Linux clients and you should set up mail forwarding with at least one other team.

Webmin - Each machine should have Webmin installed and accessible through SSL.

The output of this project:
One dual-boot client and two servers (as described above)
One document that describes the configuration of each machine and service.
A live demonstration of your mini-network. including but not limited to:
- user authentication
- Office, e-mail and web browsing
- Creating a new user
- Administering/accessing machines remotely with webmin/ssh

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Obviously not all of this material was in our textbook and it would take them more time than they had to research it themselves, so I began to put together little tutorials that would step them through the major pieces while explaining what was going on and pointing out additional resources.

Not everyone got it 100% done, needless to say, but the consensus was that they learned a lot more from the project than they would have if we had just stuck with the book. (We still got through the entire text as well.)

Probably a little more than you wanted to know, but I *am* a professional pedant so I'm apt to get pedantic at the drop of a hat.