Take a taste of training for Unix
July 3, 2006
In marketing they call them loss leaders. In the HP training community they call them Webcasts. Encompass, the surviving HP user group representing enterprise customers like 3000 sites, wants to give away an hour of HP-UX training next week, hoping to convince you that six more hours would be worth a trip to Houston in September.
The first hour is free on July 13, when you can go to the Encompass Web site, enter your ID and Password and then select 'Course Catalog' and click on "the July 13th webcast" from Bill Hassell — who's leading a 7-hour pre-conference course at this year's HP Technology Forum.
If you've never taken an Encompass Web course before — and that would probably be most of the HP 3000 community — then you'll have to sign up for "Tips and Secrets for HP-UX Admins" at the Encompass Web site. For just the effort of submitting an e-mail address, and assigning yourself a name and password, you'll be told a lot about simplifying the job of running an HP-UX server, according to Hassell's teaser for his loss leader.
In just an hour's time starting at 4 PM Eastern time in the US, he promises
Learn about the club where membership is NOT recommended and how to avoid becoming a member. You will learn why 777 and -9 are bad numbers. Discover the best way to locate disk space hogs. Find out how to synchronize server time to the world's most accurate Atomic clock . See how to run commands on dozens of servers with a single command. You will see how to avoid "not a typewriter" errors and an easy way to summarize syslog messages.
With a lesson list like that for just 60 minutes, it makes you wonder what Bill will be able to do with an all-day session in September.
But you can't beat the price on this first hour, and getting a Unix tour from somebody who knows the terrain as well as Hassell could spark some interest among any less-than-excited converts to a new operating environment. Change happens. Get over it, HP advises. Training helps get over the hump; and you might be able to leverage that free hour into a training trip to the Lone Star State this fall.