Focused, hands-on problems for sharpening your DevOps and server-side skills. Some teach specific concepts while others mirror real-world scenarios. Every challenge includes hints, feedback, and automated solution checks.
A Deployment is running in the platform namespace with 3 replicas. Each pod has configuration files at /app/config/. Copy those files to /home/laborant/config/ on the local machine.
Turn the manual storage provisioning workflow into an automation script: partition, format, mount, and persist a blank drive with a single non-interactive script.
Export an Alpine container rootfs using crane, set up a chroot environment, and execute a musl-linked binary that fails to run on the host system.
A stubborn process is running on the system, kill it :)
A Job manifest at /home/laborant/batch-job.yaml is exiting with a non-zero exit status. The Job has limited retries configured. Inspect the cluster and the manifest to find the bug, fix it, and reapply.
A helper script that lists every container image running in the cluster — along with its on-disk size and the workload that uses it — has been downloaded to cplane-01. Install it as a kubectl plugin named kubectl-images so that kubectl images works from any directory.
Refactor a slow, single-threaded C file downloader that fetches files sequentially into a multi-threaded program using POSIX Threads (pthreads) to achieve concurrent downloads.
Write a C program that calls fork() to clone a process and execve() to execute a command, then print and retrieve the child process PID.
Compile a small C loop with -O2 -S, inspect the generated assembly, report how many add instructions gcc produced and see how much it has optimized the equasion.
Run gcc -E on a small C program and find the exact line where the preprocessor expanded a macro into a printf call.
