February 2008 Meeting - SysAdmin Games

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