Once again, Mr. Hart and I took the senior team of Ryan Vrobel, Isaac Trost, Tanmay Sharma and Jarek Smith as well as a Junior team consisting of Alex Cihon, Anthony Spencer and Holly Goodwill down to Gannon (our valued sponsor) to take on round 2 in their beautiful I-HACK building. We met our extremely awesome mentor Brian Theissen down there, and the game was on!
We were in a different lab this time due to some upgrades Gannon was doing in the main labs of IHACK. The setup was still great, but I think it threw the students off just a bit. This round was a bit tougher than round 1 too. There were 3 virtual machines this time (Server 2022, Mint 21, Windows 11). The scoring started off pretty slow for both teams. The scripts they had written had failed, and one even bricked a machine causing them to have to start over on the Mint.
As the competition went on, scores were trickling in, but it was nothing like round one. It seemed like every point had to be earned. Fortunately, the teams have built a habit of recording what they did to score points, so that if they brick a machine and have to start all over, they know what to do to get back the points they lost in the reset…this happened a few times. One of the problems that seemed to emerge was that the machines could not restart after updates. This happened for both teams. I don’t think it was the competitor’s fault, honestly, I think something was just off with the images (we made sure to allocate plenty of memory and space for the VMs and allocate the space inside the images themselves). Nonetheless, the teams were intently focused for the full 4 hours (with some exceptions related to too much caffeine…Isaac found a vending machine and bought everyone drinks), and by the end they had posted some pretty respectable scores.
The Junior team performed extremely well for their second competition ever. Each one had their own machine to get started. Tony worked on Mint 22, Alex worked on Windows Server 2022, and Holly worked on Windows 11. Tony also hopped onto the other machines to pitch in and try different things, and took over Server 2022 when Alex had to leave due to some misleading info I gave him about pickup time. At the time of writing this, they are 531 out of 2032 nation wide, and 18th in the state.
On the Senior team, Isaac worked on Windows 11, Tanmay worked on Mint 22 and Ryan worked on Windows Server 2022; Jarek did the NetAcad work and then floated to fill in and try other things. Of course, they did switch up every now and again, so really everyone was working on everything. Together they were a powerhouse! By the end, they had scored 2033 points on the images!…at the time of writing this, that puts them at 104 out of 2032 in the nation, and 4th in the state!
A few key takeaways:
- The scripts could use some work. Specifically with testing before the competitions. It would seem that it would be beneficial to make sure to test them on the machines we are going to be using (eg. A script that works on Windows 10, may not work on Windows 11).
- Other than Friday visits with Brian, not much class time was dedicated to this. Perhaps I need to find a way to encourage that more.
- Do the checklists!….It seemed that it was a common recurrence to ask “did you do the checklist?” and get “no” for a response. The checklists are there for a reason. They can help you focus and maximize your time. There is an important Apache list in Linux that should never be ignored.
- More caffeine IS NOT the answer.
Summary
This competition was rougher than round 1, which I think is how the season is designed. I think both teams performed extremely well and I hope they came out feeling as though they learned more on how best to approach these days. I could not be more proud of how they attacked the machines today, and how well they focused and fought to the end. This was a battle. I think there’s a good chance the Senior team will be put in the platinum tier of the states competition and I think the Juniors are set up well to come strong in Gold. The next competition (States!) will be December 13th….I can’t wait!
I think caffeine is always the answer but not in the case for Isaac or Anthony. But on a more serious note, I think if I worked harder and put more time into the script for windows it would have gone way better, I also think both teams need to put in more time into cisco packet tracer.
I think caffeine is always the answer and if Jarek didn’t make me stop drinking energy drinks we would have done much better.