### Announcing the Inaugural Advent of Sysadmin 2025!

For too long, we’ve watched our developer colleagues have all the fun in December. While they’re joyfully solving algorithmic puzzles and optimizing code, we’re the ones getting paged because a certificate expired or a disk filled up. We are the guardians of uptime, the masters of the command line, the silent heroes of the server room.

This year, it’s our turn.

Welcome to the first-ever **Advent of Sysadmin**, kicking off on December 1st, 2025. This is not about writing the most efficient sorting algorithm. This is about real-world chaos, distilled into a daily challenge. It’s a 24-day gauntlet designed to test your troubleshooting, configuration, and automation skills.

#### What to Expect

Every day at midnight UTC, a new challenge will be unlocked. Each one will present you with a broken system, a misconfigured service, or a cryptic error message. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to fix it.

These aren’t your typical coding puzzles. Forget Big O notation; we’re talking about exit codes. The challenges will be delivered via a personal, temporary SSH instance or a downloadable container. Your goal isn’t just to find an answer—it’s to restore service.

Here’s a taste of what you might face:

* **Log File Forensics:** A web server is throwing 500 errors. Dive into gigabytes of logs using `grep`, `awk`, and `sed` to pinpoint the single misconfigured line causing the outage.
* **The DNS Debacle:** “It’s not DNS.” Except this time, it is. You have a zone file, a recursive resolver, and a whole lot of confused clients. Make them talk to each other again.
* **Firewall Fiasco:** A junior admin “secured” the server. Now, nothing works. You’ll need to untangle a mess of `iptables` or `nftables` rules to let legitimate traffic through without exposing the system to the world.
* **Container Calamity:** A critical application in a Docker container won’t start. Is it a bad entrypoint? A volume permission issue? A networking problem? You’ll have to `exec` your way to the solution.
* **The Scripting Scramble:** A legacy backup script written in Bash is failing silently. Debug the script, fix the logic, and make sure it runs reliably via a `cron` job.
* **Incident Response:** On the final days, expect a full-blown crisis. A multi-system outage, a suspected security breach, or a cascading failure. You’ll need to triage, mitigate, and document the root cause.

#### Who Is This For?

This event is for anyone who has ever stared at a blinking cursor and felt a sense of power.

* **Junior Sysadmins & IT Support:** Sharpen your fundamental skills in a safe, controlled environment.
* **Senior Sysadmins & SREs:** Prove your mastery and race against the clock for a spot on the global leaderboard.
* **DevOps Engineers:** Show off your automation prowess by solving problems with Ansible, Terraform, or a brilliant one-liner.
* **Network Engineers:** Remind everyone that without the network, there’s nothing left to administer.
* **Security Professionals:** Hone your blue-team skills by identifying and patching vulnerabilities under pressure.

#### How to Prepare

You don’t need a fancy IDE or a deep knowledge of data structures. What you need is your wits, your favorite terminal, and a solid grasp of the command line.

1. **Sharpen your tools:** Get comfortable with `ssh`, `scp`, `tmux` or `screen`.
2. **Know your OS:** Be familiar with Linux file systems, permissions, and process management.
3. **Master the text trio:** `grep`, `awk`, and `sed` will be your best friends.
4. **Networking fundamentals:** Understand the basics of TCP/IP, DNS, and HTTP.

Mark your calendars. Clean up your dotfiles. The servers are waiting, and they are all broken. Let’s see who can bring them back to life. The first alert fires on December 1st, 2025. Are you ready to be on call?