Capital Area BSD Users Group

February 26, 2008
6:30 pm	to	8:30 pm

This month, we’ll be meeting on Tuesday, February 26 at Raba in Columbia, MD. Jason Dixon will be serving as BOFH for our first SysAdmin Games. As usual, we’ll grab a beer and food after the meeting at either Green Turtle, Nottingham’s or the Dog Pub.

From Jason:

The main focus of this meeting is to have fun learning more about what we already enjoy… BSD administration. But since this might be a recurring event, our official theme this month will be “Secure Webservers”. We will be utilizing a QEMU or VMware Server running virtual machines for each of the team images. Each virtual system will have local network access only, with a dedicated sandbox system for external access (see “life-line” information below) and testing purposes.

We will need an additional laptop for each team, for managing each respective virtual machine (via VMware web client or SSH). I think we will have this covered easily, but if you have a laptop you want to bring in for your team, please do. Here are the details, let me know if you have any questions.

P.S. Yes, I will be serving as the BOFH.

bofh$ cat sysadmin_games.txt

• Theme
  • Secure Webservers
• Goals
  • Install a BSD operating system and dependencies as needed
  • Configure networking
  • Configure the host firewall
  • Configure a webserver with a self-signed certificate
  • Configure start-up services
• Rules
  • Each team will have a “mentor”. This individual will act as a team leader and “life-line” resource for the competition.
  • Each team will have a series of 3 “life-lines”. The life-line period is a maximum of 10 minutes.
    1. Mentor = A team may request the assistance of the mentor from another team. If the question is satisfied (to be determined by the BOFH), the mentor’s team receives a 10-point bonus. If the question is *not* satisfied, the mentor’s team receives a 10-point debit. An assisting mentor may *not* utilize their own life-lines for the purpose of assisting another team.
    2. Google = A team may utilize any internet resource for research on their project.
    3. Phone = A team member may call one individual for assistance. Competition participants are excluded from being an assisting party.
  • Each team will use a different BSD operating system selection. This will be determined by a series of trivial questions at the beginning of the competition. The team to correctly answer a question gets to select the BSD used by *their choice* of one of the other remaining teams. This will continue until all teams have been assigned an operating system.
    Example: Team A wins the first question. They choose DragonflyBSD for Team C. Team B wins the second question. They choose NetBSD for Team A. Team C wins the final question. They choose MirBSD for Team A (poor bastards).
  • Each team will have a maximum of one hour to complete the allotted tasks.
  • Each team will have 10 minutes to present their final results to the BOFH for points redemption.
• Awards
  • The winning team gets a free round of beer.

# EOF

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