SadServers Newsletter #7

Hello, this is the not-so-frequent SadServers.com newsletter.

Scenarios

There are seven new challenges since the last newsletter, with more coming soon:

"Apia": Needle in a Haystack , an easy "find the differences" scenario. Credit Sebastian Segovia
"Manado": How much do you press? , an interesting challenge where you need a way and a tool to compress a file as much as you can. Credit Sebastian Segovia
"Warsaw": Prometheus can't scrape the webserver , a simple Prometheus scenario, perhaps our first scenario that is a "DevOps" one. Credit Kamil Błaż
"Moyogalpa": Security Snag. The Trials of Mary and John , medium-hard scenario: permissions, certificates and other security issues in one challenge. Credit Yaser Kalali
"Helsingør": The first walls of postgres physical replication , simple scenario for Postgres people, not so easy if you are not familiar with pg replication. Funny story, I brought down a production replica postgres server for not knowing what this challenge can teach you :-) Credit Marvin
"Bekasi": Supervisor is still around , in a world where systemd reigns supreme, there are still supervisord servers, we can learn something new here. Credit Marvin
"Florence": Database Migration Hell , this is one of the hardest (if not THE hardest) scenario in SadServers, while still being fairly realistic. Several things to fix so it's not one tricky issue. Credit Kamil Błaż

Improvements

Not sure if an "improvement" but SadServers has recently moved to a freemium model, as announced in the Christmas Eve newsletter #5. I really appreciate the support of all of you who bought me "coffee" but unfortunately that covered only a small part of the bills. So I created Pro Accounts, with several benefits like:
- Access to all scenarios. As we keep adding scenarios, some of the best ones will be paid-only (some may stay free for a while).
- Unlimited tries of all scenarios and no rate-limiting (unlimited tries per day).
- Double the time to complete any scenario.
- Servers with public IPs, Internet access and "bring your own SSH client".
Other advantages for Pro accounts are also planned, like having a public link to an Achievements Page where users can showcase their troubleshooting skills. I'm open to any other ideas that bring value.
Here's the Pricing page to sign up. It's all managed with Stripe (I'm not storing credit card info for ex). If you want to sign up to try out some scenarios and cancel right away (spending $5 and having a subscription for a month) that's perfectly fine. I made cancelling as easy as I could with just one click from the Dashboard to go to Stripe (then a cancellation click and a confirmation click).

Other

Make Money with SadServers. This is still very much ongoing!. If you have a tech problem that can be packaged in a SadServers scenario, I'll pay for it. I'm especially interested in hard, realistic challenges.
Slowly but surely, some older scenarios with issues are being fixed.
As usual, I'm happy to receive any feedback or ideas about how to make SadServers better.

Thanks,

Fernando

PS: Follow me in any of these for faster notification of new scenarios (I post as soon as I publish them).