Hello,

This is the SadServers newsletter, introducing new challenges designed to improve your skills and grow your Linux and DevOps abilities.

We begin the new year with a recap of the scenarios created at the end of the last year, in particular during the very successful "Advent of Sysadmin". Those scenarios had no clues, and now clues and solutions have been added. You can still see those scenarios grouped in the advent2025 tag. 

New scenarios since the last newsletter:

• "Solanea": ClickHouse mad house - our first ClickHouse challenge, here you have a chance to play around with this database.
• "Alexandria": The Vanishing Backups - an Easy cronjob scenario. If you are an experienced engineer, you can take these easy challenges as a speed run ;-) 
• "Tunis": Redis Replication Problem - a Redis challenge, a way to get a bit of experience on this key-value data store.
• "Toulon": Denied Lamp - this is a Business scenario; a scenario only available to Business accounts (good for interviewing and without public solutions)
•  "Bermuda": Command not found - another Business-exclusive scenario. I may as well mention here that Business accounts can have custom scenarios.
• "Auderghem": Containers miscommunication - good challenge to review Docker networking.
• "Marseille": Rocky security - this is a Red Hat scenario, which already may give you a clue of what the problem is going to be about...
• "Kortenberg": Can't touch this! - an easy Linux permission challenge. 
• "Woluwe": Too many images - interesting Docker scenario, may fill some Docker knowledge gaps
• "La Rinconada": Elevating privileges - La Rinconada is the highest town in the world, seemed like an apt name for a "hacking" scenario where you have to elevate your privileges. Even if you are not specially into hacking or security, it's important to be aware of these types of issues or attacks.
• "Annapurna": High privileges - another similar hacking scenario. The Herzog book by the same name was one of my favourites as a child, recommended if you like mountaineering or just adventure literature.
• "Hamburg": Find the AWS EC2 volume - this is a fairly easy scenario and yet it shows a very common task in DevOps/Cloud work regarding filtering of JSON information. It is also a pretty common exercise in DevOps job interviews.
•  "Podgorica": Docker to Podman migration - it was about time we had a Podman scenario. Podman is basically a better Docker :-)
• "Socorro, NM": Optimize Podman image - so let's have another Podman challenge
• "Torino": Optimize grande Docker image - trimming down huge Docker images is a basic Sysadmin/DevOps task, also a fairly common job interview question
• "Sumé": Tied in a Knot - A config problem in Knot, a DNS server. While it's important to be fluent in common technologies and tooling like Bash or Docker, it's also important to be exposed to other applications to practice general troubleshooting, searching etc.

What types of scenarios would you like to see in SadServers?

We are also reviewing past scenarios to improve wording or the test script. This was mostly based on your comments, keep them coming!

Last month we split the individual "Professional" paid accounts into Pro and Pro+ accounts. If you had a Professional account, it was moved to the new Pro+ while keeping the original subscription price.

Cheers,

Fernando Duran
SadServers Founder

Follow me on Bluesky, Mastodon, Twitter or LinkedIn