At OpenStack Barcelona? Pick the challenge, win GoPro! Read on to know how.
To be a good Stormer is to be a good hacker. Not necessarily in the sense that you enjoy compromising unsuspecting grandmother’s laptop or a random web cam, but that you have a curiosity about how things work. This isn’t unique in the tech industry at large, and many security conferences exploit this curiosity for fun in the form of Capture The Flag (CTF) type problem solver games and various challenges. This year for OpenStack Summit we’ve built our own challenge for people to play. The main reason is because it’s just plain fun, but we also think it’s a great way to introduce people to the power of StackStorm. If you’re bent towards curiosity and if you are a hacker at heart, read on!
Did I mention there are prizes too? Because there are. We have four Raspberry Pis to give away (RPis are also powering the demo at our booth, so you should come look) as well as two GoPros.
No competition would be fair without a few ground rules. So allow me to lay it on you. First, if someone completes all 6 levels before Thursday at 10:00am, they will automatically grab one of the two GoPros. If both aren’t claimed by Thursday at 10:00am, they drop down into the pool of prizes for raffle. On Thursday at 10:00am we’ll take a snapshot of the current standings, draw the raffle, and tweet out the winners. You’ll be free to continue the mission after that, but it won’t help your odds for getting a prize. Prizes can be collected at our booth between 10:00am and 3:00pm on Thursday, and you have to be present at OpenStack Barcelona to be eligible.
Levels 1 and 2 don’t require a running StackStorm instance to complete and are the easiest — so that is our lowest tier and we will be giving away one Raspberry Pi in that group. Levels three and four will have two Raspberry Pis, one for each level to raffle. Levels five and up will have one (or two) GoPros and a single Raspberry Pi for raffle. The higher you go the, more likely you are to win. So have at it.
How do you play? Start at stackstorm.com/challenge and hopefully you’ll figure it out. Everything is communicated through Twitter and Gist. We accept answers in the form of a SHA1 hash salted with your twitter handle: echo -n "[email protected]” | sha1sum is how you would get it. Make sure to not have any newlines or trailing spaces, because our bot certainly won’t. If you have the correct answer, you’ll get the next level’s puzzle in a direct message (you won’t get the DM if you’re not following @Stack_Storm).
To submit an answer, publicly tweet the hash (generated as described above) to @Stack_Storm with #OpenStackSummit. @Stack_Storm and #OpenStackSummit can be included anywhere in the message: as long as you have the answer hash, the mention, and the hashtag anywhere, you are good. Use the remaining characters to express your feelings, too!
If you get stuck, join our Community Slack (if you’re not there, register at stackstorm.com/community-signup first). We’ll do our best to help without giving away too much, and we have some hints prepared for people who get stuck. Hope to see you at the booth and let us know what you think of the challenge once it’s over. Would you like to see more of this in the future? Make sure to tell us!