Hello,

(You are receiving this because your email was entered in the SadServers notification form. If this is incorrect, or you do not wish to receive any further news, please just reply to this email).

 

Lots of news: Linux World Cup, new scenarios and improvements :-) 

 

Linux World Cup

The LWC 2023 ran Sept 24 and Oct 1st. You can see the results and video replay of the solved scenarios (spoiler alert!).

I want to thank the participants and volunteers, specially Fuero, PuppiestDoggo and @SorongoPowa. Fuero took himself out of the competition to help me test the scenarios and PuppiestDoggo came up with the idea for one of them (Monaco).

If you are interested in this, be on the lookout for an article or blog post I'll write about the event.

 

New Scenarios

I added the LWC scenarios and an extra one to SadServers:

• The Command Line Murders (Easy) , a small modification of Noah Veltman's work 
• "Taipei": Come a-knocking , (Easy) a very simple port knocking challenge.
• "Unimak Island": Fun with Mr Jason , an Easy-Medium task based on JSON manipulation <insert YAML joke here>
• "Ivujivik": Parlez-vous Français? (Medium), a CSV-manipulating task that can be done in many ways (awk, coding, database).
• "Paris": Where is my webserver? a "hack" challenge that can be easy or hard but it's fast to do so Medium it is.
• "Monaco": Disappearing Trick (Hard) another "hack" scenario, this one is the most fun in the LWC imho.
• "Chennai": Pull a Rabbit from a Hat , (Hard) a RabbitMQ troubleshooting scenario that was a bit challenging.

 

Improvements

The biggest improvement that you can see is the session replay system based on asciinema , all the new scenarios come with them. If you try any, after the server is destroyed when the time to solve the scenario is reached, the replay video is uploaded to SadServer's replay server and a link to it created in your dashboard. All the sessions are public so you can browse any of them. Note that the system is not 100% reliable yet, let me know if you encounter unexpected problems.

For corporate customers there are now VMs that are accessible externally and can communicate to the outside. You can SSH directly into them with your public key, or download a one-off private key for the scenario server.

 

(BTW I'm using listmonk to send this but the "unsubscribe" below doesn't work because I don't feel comfortable exposing publicly the service and its UI when it doesn't have 2FA and I'm paranoid about security. I tried SurveyMonkey and it's a pile of garbage, I'm open to ideas here).

Have fun troubleshooting and see you in a few months. Follow me on Twit- errm X or Mastodon for more updated, frequent updates and the occasional bad joke and feel free to send me feedback or ideas (email or form on the site).

 

Thanks,

Fernando