THE HANDOVER

The story

Congratulations — you're the DevOps team.

Nobody quite put it that way when they hired you. They talked about the product, the roadmap, the funding round. Your laptop arrived before your contract did. The servers came up once, in passing: "Dave handles that."

Dave won the lottery last week. The actual lottery. You've got his server, his logins, and a pile of notes he wrote on the way to the airport.

Somewhere on that box is his admin password. Find it, and everything he built is yours.

How it works

• Press play and you get your own Linux box in the browser. Nothing to install, nobody else on it.
• mail reads Dave's note. Each level's puzzle hides the next account's password; go 3 logs you into level 3.
• Your progress saves in this browser — if your session resets, come back and resume. Sign in with GitHub to keep the same box on every device and to appear on the leaderboard.
• Stuck? Re-read the note; man is there. The box has no internet — everything you need is already on it.

What you'll touch

No spoilers: files and filesystems · permissions and sudo · git's insides · processes, signals and cron. 21 levels, four acts.

Fair play

Everyone gets the same passwords, so yes, you could look them up. It's your game to spoil. The leaderboard only counts runs that climb every level.

What we record

By playing, you agree that your session is recorded: the commands you type in the game (the whole line, and whether it worked), wrong passwords, and when you reach each level. It's stored under a random ID, not your name; no IP addresses are kept. If you sign in with GitHub, that ID is linked to your account (so your devices share it) and your handle appears on the leaderboard. When the game closes, the results are published as totals and averages (fastest, slowest, typical times, popular commands per level), and the raw records are deleted. Don't type anything private into the game.

← back to play