Last week, I got kind of stuck on one of the Essentials Badge exercises, and I’m trying really hard to just do these in the order presented. I wasn’t able to work on this any during the week. Friday, I had a serious sinus flare up that kept me home from work, but later than evening and during the weekend, I started on a different badge as a “feel good, lots of progress” kind of thing. I did all 27 of the available Unix Badge exercises. There are 35 total, but only 27 are unlocked, at this time.
My goal for the rest of the week is to work on the Essentials Badge some more, one exercise or two at a time (per day.)
The rest of the weekend was kind of procrastination, because I focused on getting some progress in my favorite online game: Guild Wars 2. I did this, because sometimes you just need a break, and have some fun. I’ll keep working on getting my griffon mount, but I’m not allowed to touch the game each day until I’ve either completed an exercise in PentesterLab, or I’ve worked a full two hours without progress. If I can’t get the exercise in two hours, I don’t need to be stressing myself out over it.
The goal at this point is to get through the Essentials Badge over the next couple of weeks, then take a look at the White Badge.
So far, these exercises have been pretty straight forward, until they aren’t. I’m not sure if the last AUTHO_06 exercise I got stuck on is due to a failure to understand the requirement on my part, or due to a bug in the system. I believe I understand what is wanted, but nothing I tried last week was working, so I can’t really say. I’m considering going back through the entire AUTHO_# set using the same username every time, in case the later ones play on earlier ones, and I may have gotten my stuff out of sync, somehow.