## title: The sad servers are smiling again
       ## date: "2026-08-15"
       
       ## Introduction
       
       I was bored. I had the idea to look for a stimulating and
       challenging platform similar to LeetCode, but focused on
       Linux and DevOps.
 (HTM) LeetCode
       
       So I did some research and quickly found SadServers. I then
       decided to explore it and try to solve a few problems. This
       blog post is simply a brief review of my experience with
       SadServers.
 (HTM) SadServers
       
       In the rest of this blog post, we'll refer to the problems
       as scenarios in accordance with the SadServers terminology.
 (HTM) scenarios
       
       ## What is SadServers
       
       It's a web platform that offers scenarios for DevOps
       engineers to solve within a time limit. Each scenario is set
       up in a dedicated Linux environment accessible remotely via
       the SadServers web interface. The goal is to solve the
       scenarios and then have the solutions verified.
       
       ## My goal
       
       I set myself the goal of solving as many scenarios as
       possible until I get tired of it and/or my monthly
       subscription expires.
       
       ## My experience
       
       In this section, I'll talk about my experience with the
       platform.
       
       ### Completed scenarios
       
       I was able to complete 122 out of 124 challenges, 31 out of
       31 easy, 74 out of 74 medium, and 17 out of 19 hard.
       
       ### Time spent
       
       It took me about 3 weeks from start to finish. I recommend
       this platform to beginners and professionals who have some
       free time and want to challenge themselves. I solved an
       average of about 5 scenarios per day for 3 weeks, a little
       more on the weekends. It took me an average of 2 to 3 hours
       each evening, excluding weekends.
       
       ### Topics
       
       I find the topics quite diverse and relevant. Each one is a
       set of scenarios that could occur in a professional context,
       particularly in a corporate setting, for example, creating
       application backups that don't work, a misconfigured
       database, containers that can't communicate with each other,
       and so on.
       
       My favorite topic is Hack, it's similar to CTF challenges.
       For example, the scenario Monaco: Disappearing Trick
       literally asks you to find a flag by hacking a web server.
 (HTM) Monaco: Disappearing Trick
       
       ### Difficulty
       
       The difficulty is fairly well balanced between easy, medium,
       and hard. I first finished all the easy levels, then tackled
       the medium ones, and finally the hard ones. I could really
       tell the difficulty increased with each level.
       
       That said, I did find some hard scenarios easier than
       certain medium ones, I'm thinking in particular of
       Karakorum: WTFIT – What The Fun Is This?, which has a
       maximum solve time of 40 minutes but feels much shorter to
       me.
 (HTM) Karakorum: WTFIT – What The Fun Is This?
       
       ### Price
       
       I chose the Pro monthly subscription, which costs $9 per
       month. I don't think that's very expensive considering the
       content offered. I'm happy with the purchase. As far as I
       understand, SadServers pays AWS to be able to deploy a new
       VM for each challenge.
       
       However, I probably won't continue paying since I've already
       completed 99% of the challenges and not many new ones are
       being released. In fact, that's why I don't see the point in
       buying an annual subscription. Because in 12 months, you
       have more than enough time to solve all the scenarios.
       
       ## Conclusion
       
       I really enjoyed SadServers. Thanks to Fernando Duran for
       creating and maintaining it, it kept me busy while allowing
       me to put my DevOps engineering skills to use. It also
       helped me achieve my goal while having fun and challenging
       myself. I found it very fun and challenging, these are great
       exercises for learning new technical skills and even for
       improving your existing ones.