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Very cool! This reminds me of the ops challenge @ Slack. I'm not sure if they still do this, but the SRE/platform infra interview used to involve a VM running a malfunctioning LAMP stack.

You'd get SSH access to the VM, then submit a diagnostic report of what was broken (and how you fixed it).

Reminded me of how Red Hat used to run their certification test (RHCE). I probably still have the live CDs for my RHCE laying around somewhere.

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I've had interviews like that in the past, and really enjoyed them. Much better than "Draw an architecture diagram for how you'd handle a serverless IoT application" - where you lose points, silenly, because you didn't pick something the interviewer expected you to do.

Usually a simple combination of immutable files, SELinux policies, and types in configuration files were enough for most of the challenges. Though now and again you'd find they'd given you a server with packages removed, or not yet installed.

Oh that reminds me, I loved the original Stripe CTF, it's been 10 years already! https://twitter.com/fduran/status/240321390698442753

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