Teaching System Administration with limited hands-on

[Dan Marner <dmarner@marada-corp.com>]

I am teaching a course in System Administration as part of a graduate
program in Software Engineering. Since it is part of an SE program, and is
therefore targeted at developers rather than aspiring sys admins, I am
concentrating more on abstract issues such as writing a disaster recovery
plan than on platform-specific details.

That said, there is a lot of interest among my students in getting some
practical experience in the administration of UNIX and NT systems.
Unfortunately, I don't have a lab full of workstations on which I can hand
out root access. All of the students have user accounts on one HPUX
system, and that's it. Some will be willing to install Linux or BSD on
their own machines, and I plan to encourage that, but I can't require it.

Does anyone out there have ideas, experience or pointers to resources for
teaching system administration with little or no hands-on? 

Thanks, 
Dan Marner

--
Dan Marner                         Sys/Network/DB Admin
dmarner@marada-corp.com            Marada Corporation
(304) 534-5600                     Fairmont, WV