SadServers

The biggest issue with reliability and security in computer systems 😀

Last SadServers newsletter is out! list.sadservers.com/archive

"This is one of the best website that i had come across, I really enjoy the statements and tasks, it feels like going through a game under the time period you are performing any activity here." love.sadservers.com/t/9b5e7397-5...

"This is way more interesting than learning from tutorials. Finally found a good learning platform for me to learn about Linux servers and DevOps skills to further improve my skill set and career opportunity!" love.sadservers.com/t/7acad25d-8...

Three new Financial / FIX protocol scenarios with advanced text parsing and manipulation sadservers.com/tag/financial

New AWS FinOps hands-on challenge "Auckland": S3 delete & archive old backups sadservers.com/scenario/auc...

(Funny they included the cents in the figure). So Linux sysadmin / DevOps / Infra Eng / Cloud Eng / Platform Eng / SRE / flavour of the month whatever want to call it Eng will still be in demand 🙂

New SadServers AWS cli scenario "Istanbul": Delete unattached AWS EBS volumes , a pretty common cloud engineering task sadservers.com/scenario/ist...

Waterloo Rocketry Reaches New Heights With World's Highest Amateur Liquid Bi-propellant Rocket. SadServers, another endeavour from Waterloo reaching new heights is happy to sponsor them! 🚀 www.waterloorocketry.com

New SadServers scenario based on a real situation: needing to renew a TLS/SSL certificate and having many keys from different certificates without documentation of which key matched the certificate sadservers.com/scenario/sal...

love.sadservers.com/t/46b41eb1-4...

Brave is a privacy-focused search engine with its own index. Glad to see more people coming to SadServers from it search.brave.com

New optional SadServers UI for registered users (need to log in, Beta) pager.sadservers.com 🚀

"It's like KodeKloud but way better" love.sadservers.com/t/1385b955-4...

Four users so far have been able to solve the super-hard "Cadiz" SadServers scenario. Not for the faint of heart; here's the comment of one of those special users: love.sadservers.com/t/5d5b11fc-d...

Sunday is for spicy takes. How to write a recruiter email engineers will actually answer (or whatever bait title you want, you get the point) docs.sadservers.com/blog/how-to-...

New #Linux SadServers scenario "Dakar": The half-installed package , what happens if an apt package is not fully installed? practice on a live server sadservers.com/scenario/dakar

Last SadServers bulletin: list.sadservers.com/archive/0f93... We released 7 new scenarios in the last 4 weeks plus new features 😀

Our hardest #Linux scenario yet, expecting very few people to solve it (AI agent couldn't after millions of tokens). Thinking of giving out a prize for defusing the bomb 💣 : sadservers.com/scenario/cadiz

Canada just rebuilt 4 nuclear reactors at Darlington. 4 months EARLY. C$150M UNDER budget. They didn't work on the reactor but a copy of it, some "DevOps' practice here 😀 x.com/BenArendi/st...

SadServers scenario running in a browser sandbox using WebAssembly, thanks to vpod: vpod.sh/usecases/sad...

New #kubernetes SadServers scenario "Kyoto" . Investigate and troubleshoot why a recent change is making an API fail, and fix it. sadservers.com/scenario/kyoto

Checklists are a great tool for DevOps/SRE professionals; a must-have for production procedures of any complexity. The book "The Checklist Manifesto" is a good read and the related podcast is just 1 hr tinyurl.com/rkhsenej

Docker healthchecks can be confusing, we explore them in this new SadServers scenario "Spa": The Docker Compose healthcheck that does not heal sadservers.com/scenario/spa

New SadServers scenario "Hangzhou", a bit advanced NGINX QA configuration challenge sadservers.com/scenario/han...

New SadServers scenario "Nara": No ls on this system This is a fun challenge where we took out 'ls' and 'find', still there are at least 9 ways in this server to list and find a target file in a directory structure (and we learn something ourselves 😄) sadservers.com/scenario/nara

Not sure if to laugh or to cry; getting phishing attempts impersonating my own service 🫤

We'd rather spend time adding tangible value to our users (new scenarios, new features) than doing maintenance. BUT it can be argued a security issue -even if unlikely - could affect users, so we upgrade to keep our bar of no dependencies with Critical or High vulnerabilities.

It's been 35 years since Linus announced his Linux hobby project. It's a light one but I'm surprised not a lot of people have heard about his book talking about the early years. Same with Kernighan's book, which is a great read and anybody in the Unix/Linux world should read imho.

New pricing page. Allows for upgrades directly from the page while blocking things like a distracted user buying a second subscription (it has happened). Also ask and you shall receive: new individual "lifetime" purchase option for the super fans. sadservers.com/pricing

Have we invented a better command dependency tool (DAG) than "make"? it's from the 70s and I use it all the time (my cli is all 'git' and 'make' with the occasional 'docker')

"overnight success" 😀 SadServers has been updated every week in the last two years, either code or scenarios (weekends especially productive, one gap due to external emergency)

When you take out playwright testing our of your Docker image 🤏

another case of retrying making things worse when there's a lot of traffic www.githubstatus.com/incidents/zk...

Called this back in May. Copilot has different price tiers now with a high-cost one coming up.

😠 www.githubstatus.com guess we'll have to develop locally, like our ancestors did

New #Linux practical SadServers challenge "Bergen": Port already in use (kind of giving a clue here) , how fast can you fix this issue? sadservers.com/scenario/ber...

Last SadServers newsletter went out list.sadservers.com/archive/3441... Sign up so you don't miss new scenarios and news list.sadservers.com/subscription...

New Linux SadServers scenario "Vienna": The Vanishing Process, a systemd hands-on challenge sadservers.com/scenario/vie...

Gitea is a self-hosted CI/CD platform. Check out SadServers latest practical challenge involving this tool: sadservers.com/labs/gitea/

Using Sentry for incident, logs and metrics. It's way cheaper than DataDog and the cost can be anticipated (you can cap it too).

What We Learned Running AWS Spot Instances in Production docs.sadservers.com/blog/what-we...

If the AI support agent of a multibillion company like @stripe hallucinates a dashboard option and highlights in a statement the opposite of reality, imagine what the AI agents doing support on other sites are saying. (Unlike other sites at least with Stripe I can RTFM)

Classy and Canadian "not our fault but sorry anyways" tailscale.com/blog/hugging...

Happy sysadmin day

New SadServers scenario (gunicorn + ninx + Flask) "Banha" : Intermittent 504 Gateway Time-Out errors sadservers.com/scenario/banha

New SadServers PostgreSQL challenge "Luxor" sadservers.com/scenario/luxor

New SadServers scenario "Philadelphia": htop, btop and zombies 🧟‍♂️ sadservers.com/scenario/phi...