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Advent of Sysadmin 2025
- teddyh 10mo ago[flagged]
- thatxliner 10mo agowell advent of code also needs an account
- stonecharioteer 10mo agoThis also has a paid account and a business account.
- thaumasiotes 10mo agoAnd if you have a paid account, you get extra time to complete the challenge! Somehow, SadServers seems to have entirely missed the concept of a "puzzle".
- npinsker 10mo agoIt’s not necessary to see the problems though
- unsnap_biceps 10mo agoIt's not clear that you will need an account to see the problems. Logged in with my account and it's exactly the same page. It's not Dec 1st everywhere yet, so they might open up for everyone when they do open them up.
- fragmede 10mo agohow do you want it to work? do you even sysadmin?
- mekoka 10mo agoI think the point is "ok, account is free, then what?" At 5$/m I might give the paid subscription a try.
- jbmsf 10mo agoI see: a page offering something interesting but vague. If you tell me more, I might sign up. If I have to create an account first, I'm walking away.
- teddyh 10mo ago> how do you want it to work? I would like to see and try to solve the scenarios for myself, not to get meaningless internet points. If you look at their front page, you can do that right now. So why do I have to create an account to even see these special advent scenarios? > do you even sysadmin? Yes.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- fduran 10mo agoChecking out how the platform works was two clicks away: home -> give me a server. I don't know of any other SaaS which gives you a VM with one click without any registration but we do it. In any case thanks for the feedback, I've put a button on this /advent page for clarity, cheers
- teddyh 10mo agoThis text: > Sign up for a free account (needed to keep track of your progress) is a complete lie. Tracking a person’s progress is what cookies are for. You don’t need us to create an account for that. What you do need users to create accounts for, is for you to track every user and their progress.
- melvinodsa 10mo agoWhen I get sad and nothing to do in the world, may be hacking into a sad server's problem seems very interesting
- rvz 10mo ago[flagged]
- 0xbadcafebee 10mo agoHere's 12 Sysadmin/DevOps (they're synonyms now!) challenges, straight from the day job: 1. Get a user to stop logging in as root. 2. Get all users to stop sharing the same login and password for all servers. 3. Get a user to upgrade their app's dependencies to versions newer than 2010. 4. Get a user to use configuration management rather than scp'ing config files from their laptop to the server. 5. Get a user to bake immutable images w/configuration rather than using configuration management. 6. Get a user to switch from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. 7. Get a user to stop keeping one file with all production secrets in S3, and use a secrets vault instead. 8. Convince a user (and management) you need to buy new servers, because although "we haven't had one go down in years", every one has faulty power supply, hard drive, network card, RAM, etc, and the hardware's so old you can't find spare parts. 9. Get management to give you the authority to force users to rotate their AWS access keys which are 8 years old. 10. Get a user to stop using the aws root account's access keys for their application. 11. Get a user to build their application in a container. 12. Get a user to deploy their application without you. After you complete each one, you get a glass of scotch. Happy Holidays!
- jagged-chisel 10mo ago> … from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. Oh, good lord why?
- vachina 10mo agoBecause sysadmim wants to outsource their responsibilities (and job).
- 0xbadcafebee 10mo agoMany, many reasons... the most important of which is, Jenkins is a constant security nightmare and a maintenance headache. But also it's much harder to manage a bunch of random Jenkins servers than GHA. Authentication, authorization, access control, configuration, job execution, networking, etc. Then there's the configuration of things like env vars and secrets, environments, etc that can also scale better. I agree GHA kinda sucks as a user tool, but as a sysadmin Jenkins will suck the life out of you and sap your time and energy that can go towards more important [to the company] tasks.
- kralos 10mo agoimagine typing in a terminal... you want to delete the previous word so press ctrl+w... actually you're in a browser; the window closes... :sadness:
- fduran 10mo agohello, creator here, sorry about that. In this case you can click again on the "Open the Server Terminal in a New Window" button
- kralos 10mo agoIt would be cool if we could SSH into the temporary host (I'm guessing these hosts currently aren't internet connected to avoid abuse so might not be possible or require some super careful firewalling)
- fduran 10mo agoHello, SadServers guy here. Free VMs are sandboxed (no way in or out other than coming in through the proxy) for security reasons. Paid accounts have VMs with internet access and SSH access (and your pub key is added to all VMs for convenience)
- melvinodsa 10mo agoWe used to run terminal in browser using https://github.com/yudai/gotty https://github.com/yudai/gotty and the entire dev team remapped their Ctrl+w to Ctrl+`. We did frontend and backend development with this setup almost for 1.5 years. Muscles memory and till this date, always have the fear if my actual terminal will get closed if I use Ctlr+w :P
- CoolCold 10mo agoI feel your pain - bites me from time to time, especially in KVM ;)
- protomikron 10mo agoYou can use ctrl+shift+t to open the recently closed tab again.
- NooneAtAll3 10mo agowhat's the deal with 12-days advent calendars lately?
- swyx 10mo agoaren't they canonically 12? 12 days of christmas etc
- dragonwriter 10mo agoNo, Advent is the liturgical season preceding Christmas, beginning the fourth Sunday before Christmas (which is also the Sunday nearest November 30), it is a period of at least three weeks and one day (the shortest period that can start on a Sunday and include four Sundays.) The 12 days of Christmas start on Christmas and end on January 5, the eve of the Feast of Epiphany. 12-day advent calendars are a fairly recent invention that mirrors the 12-days of Christmas, but has no direct correspondence to anything in any traditional Christian religious calendar (the more common 24-day format is also a modern, but less recent, invention detached from the religious calendar, that simplifies by ignoring the floating start date of advent and always starting on Dec. 1.)
- wang_li 10mo agoIn the Orthodox Church advent starts on November 15th and continues until December 24th.
- dragonwriter 10mo agoTrue, I should have specified that the timing I was providing was the Western tradition; the Orthodox (both Eastern and Oriental, I believe) tradition has a 40-day Nativity Fast (in some, the name is different in others) mirroring the 40-day season of Lent, that is similar (in terms of being a preparatory season for the Feast of the Nativity) to the Western Advent.
- c0wb0yc0d3r 10mo agoAdvent calendars track time until Christmas. “12 days of Christmas” are the twelve days after Christmas.
- tonyhart7 10mo agonow we need advent of arts,math etc
- dubya 10mo agoFor math, the AMC 10 and AMC 12 tests have 25 questions each, some of them quite challenging. Both are high school level math, no calculus. Search "2025 amc 10" for this year's problems and solutions.
- udev4096 10mo agoI wonder if we could get something like that for k8s, docker and other container ecosystem
- fduran 10mo agoHello, SadServers guy here. We have scenarios running on k8s, both on single VMs (the ones you can see in the scenario list) and we also have a beta/PoC k8s cluster where we currently run a couple of scenarios as single pod (a docker container) or as a full system (the "kubernetes playgrounds", which is kind of hidden while we test it). Is this what you were wondering? we do have pending to introduce podman scenarios as well
- zhouzhao 10mo ago[dead]
- irusensei 10mo agoIt seems it's called SRE nowadays right? I hate how things keep being renamed for no reason other than making more buzzwords for suits.
- oarmstrong 10mo agoI share your disdain for buzzwords but SRE is definitely a different role.
- kortilla 10mo agoNope, SREs keep applications running on a platform. Lots of metrics, tools to deploy apps in whatever rollout process the company has, etc. In small companies, sysadmin might be a duty of the SRE team, but they definitely diverge if you have a large on-prem deployment or work with bespoke VMs in the cloud.
- phrotoma 10mo agoThe definition I liked best, which I _think_ came from one of the Google SRE books though I'm not certain, was: "SRE is what happens when you consider operations to be a software problem".
- dontdoxxme 10mo agoWithout sharing too many spoilers... I solved the challenge but the check script was unhappy. The curl commands in the script worked fine, the earlier parts of the script failed, i.e. it didn't like how I'd decided to make that work. This kind of thing annoys me. This is why CTFs are great, where the goal is to get the flag string. Obviously harder to do for sysadmin, but expecting a particular configuration when I managed to make it work without doing things exactly as they wanted is no better than a poorly written exam.
- fduran 10mo agohello, thanks for the feedback. Just deployed a new image that only checks for the objective, not at what docker network somebody uses. It is hard to have a checker that eliminates both false positives and false negatives in general, but we always try to minimize false negatives and we failed initially here.
- ofrzeta 10mo agoIt doesn't seem to record my progress.
- fduran 10mo agoHello, creator here. Have you checked your dashboard? otherwise please contact us (email or form in the website) and we'll be happy to help
- truekonrads 10mo agoI absolutely love the sadservers. Can’t wait for windows version.
- fduran 10mo ago(Creator here) thanks! and we may at some point get into Windows :-)
- john-carter 10mo ago[dead]
- alexpotato 10mo agoWe use Sad Servers for evaluating candidates for DevOps/SRE roles and it's phenomenal. Feedback from candidates is that they find it a bit stressful during the actual interview but love the approach once it's completed. The interview option also makes it trivial to just send to a candidate via Zoom chat, ask them to share their screen and "just works". Happy to answer questions folks may have about how we use it.
- zenoprax 10mo agoThis is heartening - I'm about to start with the daily challenges today and document my experience and that sort of thing. Any other suggestions? I have sysadmin experience as a homelabber and at work with a small company as a "tech lead" but have not yet had the chance to do it full time in a larger company. Currently focused on back-filling knowledge gaps and adding certs to support my existing experience.
- alexpotato 10mo agoSad Servers is great for trying out how to fix scenarios that you would probably run into while working in the real world. If you are looking into more of the "people" side of things, I would HIGHLY recommend Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss [0]. A big part of being a team lead and/or working at a larger firm is understanding where people are coming from and then convincing them that your solution is "win/win". The book is great at highlighting multiple different tactics to do that. Turn the Ship Around [1] is also great at giving examples of how to "change organizations in place". If you end up at larger firms, there will be a LOT of legacy infra and processes that you may want to improve. Marquet gives excellent examples of how to change things WHILE ALSO getting buy in from the team. 0 - https://amzn.to/48dBSn2 https://amzn.to/48dBSn2 1 - https://amzn.to/4pfL2Wb https://amzn.to/4pfL2Wb
- zenoprax 10mo agoI actually read "Never Split the Difference" a couple years ago! Initially just to prepare for a salary negotiation but I found it to be very useful in many other ways. Your second recommendation is also appropriate: I had a ton of latitude to build and configure whatever hardware was needed to solve $BUSINESS-PROBLEM (which was often very exciting) but it was done in a bit of a vacuum without any mentorship. Adapting to a more rigorous/larger/slower working environment is exactly what I need to do. Great suggestions and thanks for taking the time to respond :)
- Erwyn 10mo agoCool, might try it out! Are there any solutions repositories for them. I’d love to get an explanation for the ones I’m about to fail.
- gautamsomani 10mo agoPersonal advice: don't use solutions repo. Googling the problem and then digging deep into the solutions will teach you hell lot more. Read the man pages of commands that turn up on Google, try them with different options, try to find different commands which can do almost the same thing may be a bit differently .... all these will help you learn things lot more.
- scubbo 10mo agoMaybe I'm just extremely dumb, but I can't find how to edit files? Neither `vi` nor `nano` are installed, I don't have internet access to `apt-get update`, and I'm not about to learn `emacs` for this... EDIT: Ah, ok, `vi` is installed on the server _itself_, just not in the Docker containers. So I guess I'm going to have to `docker cp` them in. Can do o7