Oh boy, this is a fun one…
Roughly three weeks ago, my friend texted me out of the blue, showing me an email he received from Google regarding a data center workshop event! I hurriedly indicated my interest in the event and waited patiently for a confirmation of my spot…
…which never did arrive until the 1st of Dec, the day when I had only just completed the last finals paper of my semester. (finally, ⸻pun intended⸻ after three long gruesome weeks)
However, I received what I feared most, a “rejection” email. I was half expecting it based on how late I got the email. There weren’t any vacancies left, and I was disappointed, to say the least, as I had even canceled my trip back to my home country just so I could attend this event.
Regardless, I tried my luck and emailed the engagement team asking if they could slot me in should extra vacancies come up. Lo and behold, an hour before the event, they emailed me saying that there was a spot available now and I could go! SPLENDID. I immediately booked the most expensive Grab of my life and yeeted over to their offices.(which was really nice btw)
Hello there!
I was late because I only saw the email like 30mins before the event started, but I believe the event started off with some basic introduction to Google as a company, and a little bit about the Data Centre Operations. Then, it was followed by a Kahoot, which I had only just joined midway through.
Following that was the panel discussion featuring people from the operations teams and one of their intern recruiters.
Onto the juicy stuff
Ah, a mini hackathon, at least that’s what they called it. It’s a one-hour thing where we are to complete a bunch of challenges. Basically, they had a bunch of their decommissioned blade servers that they then challenged us to assemble and boot. Once booted, we’d complete a series of mini task ala capture-the-flag. The task ranges from finding out the number of cores, RAM size, physical disk size, etc.
They have a fully assembled server for us to reference in case we get lost. Overall the difficulty wasn’t that hard, but using a safety glove to build a server made it way harder than it needed to be. Needless to say, it was most definitely very exciting to assemble my first actual blade server.
The part that I was worried about the most was what flavour of Linux they’d use, but THANK GOD it’s just Debian. If it were like Arch or Alpine, I’d be screwed lol. Note that there is no internet access, so you can’t just download packages to help solve the challenge. And the flags are hidden in such a way that only by executing the right commands will get you the correct flags.
Also, this is an important one, don’t use root when running the commands. I believe the google engineers only modified the binaries in the station account and not the root account. So if you were to run them under su, the flags will NOT show up. My dumbass wasted like a good 15-20mins because of this.
Anyways, I won’t reveal any more details about the challenge, but make sure to have fun and work with your teammates! Oh yeah, there’s also a challenge for you to build an RJ45 ethernet cable, just saying hehe.
While my team and I did manage to complete all the challenges, unfortunately, we didn’t place top third.
Closing
After the prize giving and closing speech, the event concluded with a food & networking session where we’d get to talk to the teams working at the data center operations. Lots of interesting insights from the Google folks there! Also, I managed to make a few new friends, which definitely made the entire event less daunting. Me no good at talking to strangers haha.
Well, that’s all I wanted to say. I had a great time! Thanks to the team that organised this event, and a special shoutout to the person that gave me the last-minute opportunity to come to the event!
