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

In this puzzle box we will navigate around our terminal environment to retrieve the initial project files from /var/public/USER, and mingle with different commands, archives, and encoding systems while solving the puzzle. Some of the commands we will use are outlined in the toolbox below.

After retrieving setup.exe, we have to figure out what to do with the file. Extensions are deceiving as they don't necessarily dictate what the file type really is, which is a common theme in this puzzle. We'll have to be cautious of this. In fact, in some cases we will actually have to change the extension of the file so that the tools we use know they can interact with them. Some of the tools we use will ignore files that seem incompatible based off of their naming convention.

TOOLBOX

  • base64(1) - base64 encode/decode data and print to standard output
  • chmod(1) - change file mode bits
  • cp(1) - copy files and directories
  • file(1) - determine file or data format
  • mv(1) - move (rename) files
  • tac(1) - concatenate and print files in reverse line-wise
  • rev(1) - concatenate and print files in reverse character-wise
  • tar(1) - an archiving utility
  • uudecode(1) - decode an uuencoded file
  • grep(1) - searching text within files
  • sort -n - sort file numerically by start of each line
    • This will become especially useful towards the end of our puzzle box as it will allow us to sort our results which we will ultimately submit. You can pipe the results of this command into your *results* file directly.
 

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: 

65:tpb0:final tally of results (65/65)
*:tpb0:submitted results file via submit tool [8/8]
*:tpb0:submitted tpb0steps file via submit tool [8/8]
*:tpb0:results md5sum matches project MANIFEST [8/8]
*:tpb0:results is correctly unscrambled and assembled [8/8]
*:tpb0:tpb0steps contains valid set of instructions [8/8]
*:tpb0:tpb0steps any commentary after hash mark [8/8]
*:tpb0:emailed results via instructions [8/8]
*:tpb0:matching subject line as per instructions [9/9]

Pertaining to the collaborative authoring of project documentation

Additionally