I'm happy that a lot of people use and find SadServers beneficial while not costing me a lot of money. Still a lot of features to implement on the website and a shrinking backlog of scenario ideas to materialize (if somebody has ideas for Linux/Docker/Kubernetes etc troubleshooting scenarios, please let me know).
I've just tried several of your challenges and they're all painfully accurate for real-world scenarios. I will definitely point people at these next time I'll get asked how I learned to fix <random Linux configuration problem>!
As for suggestions, here are some random things I needed to do recently:
- resize the boot partition of an OS (don't know how doable this is with your vserver setup, maybe use one of those WASM Linux emulators?)
- set up a systemd service/timer/socket that starts at the right time and responds correctly to reloads/restarts
- set up IPv6 correctly
- troubleshoot why a device wasn't connecting to the WiFi (DHCP service problem!)
- set up a VPN (wireguard/openvpn/etc). Expert mode: make the remote endpoint have an A/AAAA record that the server isn't listening on
- troubleshoot why some of my devices couldn't ssh into a server despite the pubkeys being in the authorized_keys folder (old sshd version didn't understand the most recent key algorithm!). Bonus problem: ~/.ssh had the wrong permissions so the authorized keys weren't loading.
- renew an ACME/letsencrypt certificate in nginx in proxy mode (location / was proxied but location /.well-known/... shouldn't have been!)
- check your preferred smtp daemon to see if it's set as an open relay
- upgrade postgres from an old version to a new version without data loss (hard mode: the partition postgres uses by default doesn't have the free space to make a copy and migrate the data)
- figure out why the firewall isn't blocking port 1234 despite UFW being enabled and a block-all rule being present (it was because of Docker iptables rules overriding UFW rules)
- update a package that has some kind of dependency issue (i.e. an external repository that is no longer needed)
- make Ubuntu shut up about Ubuntu Pro and stop it from fetching ads on ssh login
- alter a systemd service file so that it no longer runs as root (hard mode: set up dynamic users and other hardening features)
ps ax showed a python3 process running /home/ubuntu/badlog.py, so I knew to kill that.
If it wasn't named so obviously it would've been much harder to find it.
