moth/docs/administration.md

Administration

Everything you need to do happens through the filesystem. Usually, in /srv/moth/state.

The server doesn't cache anything in memory, so the state directory always contains the current state.

Backing up current state

tar czf backup.tar.gz /srv/moth/state  # Full backup
curl http://localhost:8080/state > state.json  # Pull anonymized event log and team names (scoreboard)

Scheduling an automatic pause and resume

printf '-'; date --rfc-3339=s -d '10:00 PM' >> /srv/moth/state/hours.txt  # Schedule suspend at 10:00 PM
printf '+'; date --rfc-3339=s -d '08:00 tomorrow' >> /srv/moth/state/hours.txt # Schedule resume at 08:00 tomorrow

You might prefer to open /srv/moth/state/hours.txt in a text editor. I do.

Re-initalize

rm /srv/moth/state/initialized

This will reset the following:

• team registrations
• points log

Team tokens stick around, though.

Scores

Pausing/resuming scoring

echo '-###' >> /srv/moth/state/hours.txt # Suspend scoring
sed -i '/###/d' /srv/moth/state/hours.txt # Resume scoring

When scoring is paused, participants can still submit answers, and the system will tell them whether the answer is correct. As soon as you unpause, all correctly-submitted answers will be scored.

Adjusting scores

echo '-###' >> /srv/moth/state/hours.txt # Suspend scoring
nano /srv/moth/state/points.log  # Replace nano with your preferred editor
sed -i '/###/d' /srv/moth/state/hours.txt # Resume scoring

We don't warn participants before we do this: any points scored while scoring is suspended are queued up and processed as soon as scoreing is resumed.

It's very important to suspend scoring before mucking around with the points log. The maintenance loop assumes it is the only thing writing to this file, and any edits you make will remove points scored while you were editing.

Teams

Changing a team name

grep . /srv/moth/state/teams/*  # Show all team IDs and names
echo 'exciting new team name' > /srv/moth/state/teams/$teamid

Please remember, you have to replace $teamid with the actual team ID that you want to edit.

Setting up custom team IDs

echo > /srv/moth/state/teamids.txt  # Teams must be registered manually
seq 9999 > /srv/moth/state/teamids.txt  # Allow all 4-digit numbers

teamids.txt is a list of acceptable team IDs, one per line. You can make it anything you want.

New instances will initialize this with some hex values.

Remember that team IDs are essentially passwords.

Disabling team registration

teamids.txt contains a list of team IDs accepted for registration. If you don't want teams to self-register, zero out the list:

true > /srv/moth/state/teamids.txt

Manually registering a team

teamid=e2f8cc14
echo "Cool Team Name" > /srv/moth/state/teams/$teamid

Dealing with puzzles

Checking on an answer

Mothballs are just zip files. If you need to check something about a running category, just unzip the mothball for that category.

mkdir /tmp/category
cd /tmp/category
unzip /srv/moth/mothballs/category.zip
cat answers.txt  # Show all valid answers for all puzzles. Watch your shoulder!

Installing new categories

Just drop a new mothball in the `mothballs' directory.

cp new-category.mb /srv/moth/mothballs

Taking a category offline

rm /srv/moth/mothballs/old-category.mb

Removing a category won't remove points that have been scored in it!