Table of Contents

Corning Community College

CSCS1730 UNIX/Linux Fundamentals

PROJECT: The Puzzle Box (TPB0)

OBJECTIVE

Use your observational skills, ability to track and utilize details, problem solving abilities, and investigative prowess to unravel the puzzle box, which will attempt to throw obstructions in your path to deter you from success.

As usual, provide documentation on the project page.

PROCESS

Do note, the productive way to go about this project involves taking the following steps:

If you start too late, and do not ask questions, and do not have enough time and don't know what is going on, you are not doing the project correctly.

TASK

You are to unravel the puzzle, getting to the instructions inside. Be wary of deceptions and obstacles trying to throw you off track.

To start off, there is a starter puzzle, ascii.512 that must be solved and acted upon first before you can get to your actual puzzle.

You are seeking the creation of two files, that you will submit:

EDIT

You will want to go here to edit and fill in the various sections of the document:

TPB0

TOOLBOX

  • File - file is your friend. It can help you determine what type of file something is. Which could be helpful for determining *cough* decodingtools *cough* stuff.
  • apropos - It can help find the manual pages for some of the different tools that you will need to use. It might be worth paying attention to file names.
  • tac (filename) is how you flip a file text vertically
  • uudecode (filename) can decode a text file for you.
  • base64 -d can also decode a text file.
  • tar -xvf (filename) can be used to extract files from an archive.
  • man — can be used to invoke the manual on a subject / command in case you do not already know what function the aforementioned command serves.
  • rev - reverses the text in a .txt file to unscramble text.
  • chmod - allows you to change permissions.
  • sort -n allows you to sort a file numerically
  • gzip -d to decompress
  • basenc -d –base16 — can decode a message in base16

SAMPLE PUZZLE

-At the start you can only access ascii.512

-For ascii.512, complete all of the steps to be able to unlock the rest of the assignment.

-Don't forget that file allows to see any extra information about the file.

STEP 1: DETERMINE TYPE

File can be helpful for determining a file type and apropos for finding a particular command to use on such file types. Another thing to pay attention to is the actual names of the files.

STEP 2: TAKE ACTION
STEP 3: STUDY RESULTS
STEP 4: TAKE ACTION
 

SUBMISSION

To be successful in this project, the following criteria (or their equivalent) must be met:

Submit Tool Usage

Let's say you have completed work on the project, and are ready to submit, you would do the following:

lab46:~/src/SEMESTER/DESIG/PROJECT$ submit DESIG PROJECT file1 file2 file3 ... fileN

You should get some sort of confirmation indicating successful submission if all went according to plan. If not, check for typos and or locational mismatches.

RUBRIC

I'll be evaluating the project based on the following criteria:

39:tpb0:final tally of results (39/39)
*:tpb0:submitted results file via submit tool [4/4]
*:tpb0:submitted tpb0steps file via submit tool [5/5]
*:tpb0:results md5sum matches project MANIFEST [5/5]
*:tpb0:results is correctly unscrambled and assembled [5/5]
*:tpb0:tpb0steps contains valid set of instructions [5/5]
*:tpb0:tpb0steps any commentary after hash mark [5/5]
*:tpb0:emailed results via instructions [5/5]
*:tpb0:matching subject line as per instructions [5/5]

Pertaining to the collaborative authoring of project documentation

Additionally