SadServers Newsletter #8

Hello Linux/DevOps/SRE enthusiast,

This is the about once every "couple" of months SadServers newsletter.

New Scenarios

"Depok": Nginx with Brotli. This is a Medium-difficulty challenge where you can learn about Brotli compression for web sites. A tunnel to view the scenario website in a browser is needed, so it only runs in VMs with a public IP (Pro accounts).
"Tukaani": XZ LZMA Library Compromised. With this Medium level scenario you can learn more about Linux libraries and how they are loaded. There's also a companion Linux libraries article.
"Gitega": Find the Bad Git Commit. (Easy to Medium difficulty). Git is a critical skill and we're going to be moving more into DevOps topics.

New or Improved Features

There's a new Achievements Page where you can showcase your SadServers results and your troubleshooting skills. Here's an example of the initial version and it shows a skill level based on scenario points. This is a Pro account feature.
What are scenario points? Glad you asked. You get 1 point for solving an Easy scenario, 2 for a Medium and 5 for a Hard one. The Ranking page has been modified to show the top users by total points.
There are scenarios without testing for a solution (no "Check My Solution" button like in Venice, Jakarta and Linux Upskill Challenge). They were shown as "Failed" in the scenarios page and now they are given as solved if they were tried.
It happens very rarely but now if there are no available AWS spot instances, a new instance type is requested as a fail-safe.
Some scenarios may load much faster now. I found out that the VMs were ready mostly either after about ~20 seconds or at about ~80 seconds, see this HN post for example. I'm keeping AWS AMI snapshots "warm" by having stopped instances of scenario VMs. We'll see after a while if this made a difference.

New Articles

There's a "Linux and Networking Interview Bingo", the most commonly asked questions for a Infra/Cloud/DevOps/SRE role in an initial screen/filter interview. There will be more articles aimed at candidates preparing for job interviews.
The Introduction to Linux Libraries article mentioned previously. You can read this first before attempting the Tukaani scenario. Ideally there will be more articles aimed at troubleshooting, linked with practice scenarios.
Not an article but from time to time the SadServers Github repo is updated with new technical information about how the service is run. Recently I've added explanations about using SQLite, feature flags and testing.

Finally, a reminder that the Make Money Creating SadServers Scenarios is still on.

Happy learning and happy troubleshooting!

Fernando

PS: Follow me in any of these for faster notification of new scenarios and features.