But we knew that.

My brother-in-law had a problem.

He's in charge of a group of people who work for the military. They do data entry and analysis.

This is in the medical side - not classified or any thing like that.

His group got upgraded. A whole stack of shiny new computers. Lots of new security too.

The old PCs were left in a pile.

Problem: There was a lot of data on the local hard drives he needed. Ooops.

Problem: He could not login to the PCs. Once off the network, authentication did not work, and he did not know the password for the local account.

Problem: He was not allowed to plug them back into the network.

Problem: The guys who adminned them before are many layers away. It could take months of constant pressure to have them work on the issue.

Problem: The PCs were not allowed to leave the site.

Problem: No one new was allowed to enter the site without an extensive security review.

He's a super-user type geek. Know Windows, MS-Access, etc. Never touched Linux.

I explained to him how to boot the PCs via Knoppix. I gave him enough info to setup a cross-over cable private network to FTP the data to his Windows box.

Unnecessary. The machines had both DVDs and CD burners.

Boot knoppix, mount NTFS file systems, drag and drop onto the CD to initiate the burn.

Knoppix rulez!