Hello Linux/DevOps/SRE enthusiast or professional,
This is the SadServers newsletter, coming out every two months or so.
New Scenarios
- "Geneva": Renew an SSL Certificate , an Easy-Medium scenario about creating an SSL certificate with specific data, a super common task.
- "Bata": Find in /proc , an Easy challenge where I wanted to somehow take advantage of the fact that /proc is mostly read-only and owned by root, based on an idea from a Tweet about changing something there randomly. In the end it turned out to be not so special.
- "Minneapolis with a Vengeance": Break a CSV file (Medium), this is the harder version of the original "Minneapolis" challenge where we had to break a big CSV file in smaller ones, but now we check that the resulting files are proper CSV files and not just files with the right header. Good awk/sed (or coding) exercise.
- "Hanoi": Find the Multitasking Users (Medium, Pro) , an exercise about extracting and comparing values from text files, regular sysadmin work.
- "Batumi": Troubleshoot "A" cannot connect to "B" (Medium, Pro), a pretty realistic challenge, of the type that tends to show up in interviews. The article below contains the techniques needed to solve this kind of Linux troubleshooting challenge. (Versión en español: Nerdearla , incluye video).
Articles
New or Improved Features
- New or existing users can log in or sign up with their Google Gmail accounts. One click and you are good to go, no need to save one more password.
- Invite friends or candidates to any scenario: Pro accounts can create one-time URL invitations to any SadServers scenario (including paid ones) and share them. Recipients just need to click on the URL and the scenario will start for them without having to register or anything.
Roadmap
I'm looking into creating a superset of SadServers, an "Incident Simulator for SREs". You receive a page and are presented with information about a multi-component system in the form of documentation and tooling like Prometheus/Grafana and Kibana that you can interact with. You also have a shell interface and off you go. Let me know what you think.
Other
- I'm testing out collecting and displaying Testimonials. Something about credibility and trust. If you have a nice thing to say about SadServers, I'll love to hear it.
Happy learning and happy troubleshooting!
Fernando Duran
PS: Follow me in any of these for faster notification of new scenarios and features.
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