Scenario: "Saint John": what is writing to this log file?
Level: Easy
Type: Fix
Access: Public
Description: A developer created a testing program that is continuously writing to a log file /var/log/bad.log and filling up disk. You can check for example with tail -f /var/log/bad.log. This program is no longer needed. Find it and terminate it. Do not delete the log file.
Test: The log file size doesn't change (within a time interval bigger than the rate of change of the log file).
The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.
Description: There's a web server access log file at /home/admin/access.log. The file consists of one line per HTTP request, with the requester's IP address at the beginning of each line.
Find what's the IP address that has the most requests in this file (there's no tie; the IP is unique). Write the solution into a file /home/admin/highestip.txt. For example, if your solution is "1.2.3.4", you can do echo "1.2.3.4" > /home/admin/highestip.txt
Test: The SHA1 checksum of the IP address sha1sum /home/admin/highestip.txt is 6ef426c40652babc0d081d438b9f353709008e93 (just a way to verify the solution without giving it away.)
Scenario: "Resumable Server": Linux Upskill Challenge
Level: Easy
Type: Do
Access: Email
Description: This is a Debian 11 server without a challenge; it's for you to do as you please.
It's meant in principle for guided tutorials like the Linux Upskill Challenge, with some limitations (there's still no outgoing Internet access).
Once you are done with your task, you can stop (pause) your server from your dashboard.
From the dashboard at any time you can restart the stopped server to continue your tasks or you can stop the server if it's running. You can also destroy it at any time.
After 30 mins, the server will be stopped. You can restart it from the dashboard.
This is a "beta" feature and there can be some issues.
Description: There's a file /home/admin/scores.txt with two columns (the first number is a line number and the second one is a test score for example).
Find the average (more precisely; the arithmetic mean: sum of numbers divided by how many numbers are there) of the numbers in the second column (find the average score).
Use exactly two digits to the right of the decimal point. i. e., use exaclty two "decimal digits" without any rounding. Eg: if average = 21.349 , the solution is 21.34. If average = 33.1 , the solution is 33.10.
Save the solution in the /home/admin/solution file, for example: echo "123.45" > ~/solution
Tip: There's bc, Python3, Golang and sqlite3 installed in this VM.
Description: In a directory /home/admin/data, there are multiple files, all of them with same content. One of these files has been modified, a word was added. You need to identify which word it is and put it in the solution file (both newline terminated or not are accepted).
Test:md5sum /home/admin/solution should return 55aba155290288b58e9b778c8f616560 or 2eeefea9fc4b16ea624bed5c67a49d80
Check My Solution: The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can
Description: A spy has left a password in a file in /proc/sys . The contents of the file start with "secret:" (without the quotes).
Find the file and save the word after "secret:" to the file /home/admin/secret.txt with a newline at the end (e.g. if the file contents were "secret:password" do: echo "password" > /home/admin/secret.txt).
(Note there's no root/sudo access in this scenario).
Scenario: "Tokamachi": Troubleshooting a Named Pipe
Level: Easy
Type: Fix
Access: Email
Description: There's a process reading from the named pipe /home/admin/namedpipe.
If you run this command that writes to that pipe:
/bin/bash -c 'while true; do echo "this is a test message being sent to the pipe" > /home/admin/namedpipe; done' &
And check the reader log with tail -f reader.log
You'll see that after a minute or so it works for a while (the reader receives some messages) and then it stops working (no more received messages are printed to the reader log or it takes a long time to process one). Troubleshoot and fix (for example changing the writer command) so that the writer keeps sending the messages and the reader is able to read all of them.
Test: There should be a process running where a message is being sent to the pipe and that while that is running, another message can be sent to the pipe and read back. The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.
Scenario: "Yokohama": Linux Users Working Together
Level: Easy
Type: Fix
Access: Paid
Description: There are four Linux users working together in a project in this server: abe, betty, carlos, debora.
First, they have asked you as the sysadmin, to make it so each of these four users can read the project files of the other users in the /home/admin/shared directory, but none of them can modify a file that belongs to another user. Users should be able modify their own files.
Secondly, they have asked you to modify the file shared/ALL so that any of these four users can write more content to it, but previous (existing) content cannot be altered.
Test: All users (abe, betty, carlos, debora) can write to their own files. None of them can write to another user's file. All users can add more content (append)) to the shared/project_ALL file but none can change its current content. The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.
Description: A critical health check script at /opt/scripts/health.sh is supposed to run every 10 seconds. This check is triggered by a systemd timer. The script's job is to check the local Nginx server and write its status (e.g., "STATUS: OK") to the log file at /var/log/health.log. The log file is not being updated, and it appears the health check is failing.
Find out why the health check system is broken and fix it. The check will pass once the /var/log/health.log file is being correctly updated by the timer with a STATUS: OK message.
Test: The /opt/scripts/health.sh script writes STATUS: OK to /var/log/health.log every 10 seconds.
The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.
Description: A critical backup cron job has silently stopped working 3 days ago. The backup script is located at /opt/backup/backup.sh and should create daily backups in /var/backups/daily/, but no new backups have been created recently.
Looking at the backup directory, you can see old backup files from a few days ago, proving the system used to work. However, there are no error emails, no obvious error logs, and the cron service appears to be running normally.
Fix ALL issues preventing the backups from running, so that backups are created successfully and reliably.
Test directory: /var/backups/daily/ Backup script: /opt/backup/backup.sh
Test: The solution will be validated by checking if a backup file has been created in the last 10 minutes.
The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.
Description: Find in the file frankestein.txt the second most frequent word and save in UPPER (capital) case in the /home/admin/mysolution file.
A word is a string of characters separated by space or newlines or punctuation symbols .,:; . Disregard case ('The', 'the' and 'THE' is the same word) and for simplification consider the apostrophe as another character not as punctuation ("it's" would be a word, distinct from "it" and "is"). Also disregard plurals ("car" and "cars" are different words) and other word variations (don't do "stemming").
We are providing a shorter test.txt file where the second most common word in upper case is "WORLD", so we could save this solution as: echo "WORLD" > /home/admin/mysolution
This problem can be done with a programming language (Python, Golang and sqlite3) or with common Linux utilities.
Description: The Hanoi office has a Linux server with a large number of user accounts and groups. The system administrators need to identify which users belong to multiple groups for better access management.
Given two files, `users.txt` and `groups.txt`, create a new file `/home/admin/multi-group-users.txt` containing the usernames of users who belong to more than one group, one username per line, sorted alphabetically.
The `users.txt` file contains a list of usernames, one per line. The `groups.txt` file contains group names and their members, in the format `group_name:user1,user2,user3`.
Description: Given the file user_list.txt you must create all the users specified in the file with their corresponding passwords.
The entries in the user_list.txt file are stored as username;password
Test: All users are created with the right password. The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.
The objective of this exercise is to delete all the Bash history lines that contain the term foo.
Clearing out or deleting the history file /home/admin/.bash_history is not allowed. Note that in our case, new commands (including the ones to try and delete "foo" from history) are also appended to the history file.
Test: Running history |grep "foo" returns nothing.
The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.
Description: A developer has been working on Linux deployment scripts on their machine and then transferred the files to a Linux server. However, when they try to execute the scripts, they encounter the mysterious error:
-bash: cannot execute: required file not found
The scripts appear to be syntactically correct, but something is preventing them from executing properly. The developer needs your help to identify and fix the issue so the deployment can proceed.
There are several script files in /home/admin/deploy/ that need to be fixed before the deployment process can work correctly.
Test: All script files in /home/admin/deploy/ should execute without the cannot execute: required file not found error.
The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.
Scenario: "Zaragoza": Test changing critical files
Level: Hard
Type: Do
Access: Paid
Description: The goal is to make the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh return OK, without editing the original /etc/hosts file.
Think of testing changes in the critical directory /etc in a safe way. In this case, adding "127.0.0.1 my.local.test" to /etc/hosts .
There would be many ways of trying to do this with "sudo" access, like the usual procedure of making a copy of the config file, editing there and copying or renaming back to the original file. In our case, to avoid all those simple solutions, there is no general "sudo" privileges in this scenario (but there may be for some commands).
Test: The string my.local.test is in /etc/hosts
The "Check My Solution" button runs the script /home/admin/agent/check.sh, which you can see and execute.
