Worked for me :D

Once You attain enlightenment You'll know what to do.

That's how it is called in French :D

Manufacturing the Oldowan tool set was not for anyone either back in 2.6ma... The rest is history

And play golf

If only they did that using 3d additive printing performed by adruino/PV cells powered drones swarm that are controlled using crowd sourcing trough a cloud.

That'd be hardcore....

Technically this is called aristocracy

Here You assume 100% participation...

... mother nature her inspiration from artists

And Your QSA is ?

With such modest setup (~ 100 hosts), if You're a real programmer, then You should be able to handle it easely.

Task 1: learn how Ethernet technology works (for example: what a collision, why frames have certain length, why there are no crossover cables for gigabit ethernet, how 802.1q and 802.1d works). Some historical knowledge won't hurt it will give you solid bases and intuition valuable for troubleshooting.

Task 2: learn how IPv4 work, specifically stating routing. You must become proficient with netmasks (not only those containing 255's and 0's), broadcast addresses, RFC1918, NAT, TTL, and so on. At this point You do not need to bother Yourself with such things as multicast or dynamic routing.

Task 3 : learn protocols and related tools supporting IPv4: ARP, DHCP, ICMP

Task 4 : learn IPTables (this is an arbitrary choice of mine, but I like it).

Those are not steps but tasks that can be performed in parallel.

By preforming those tasks You will discover other topics of interest.

Once You are good with all that, refrain from over complicating things (read my other post:http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1244813&cid=28091781)

Don't look down on those questions. The day You try You will realize that designing good problems is *much* harder than solving them.

Talk about a big one...
Are they testing for a buffer overflow?

"HDD is as slow as a dog" beware of this symptom if this behavior does not go away when recreating a filesystem!
Modern hard drives have bad blocks when they are shipped like old ones had (there was a paper with list of bad blocks attached to every new HDD back then).

The difference is that new HDDs have extra space used to relocate bad blocks and do it automatically when they sense that a block is about do die. When there are many relocated blocks it is equivalet to having a fragmented filesystem: for a sequential read the disk head has to seek data in physical places that are afar. The apparent HDD speed decreases as the number of bad blocks increases.
The next stage is to having bad blocks reported by O/S that don't go away when overwritting them. This means that there is so many of them that there is no "extra" space left to relocate them. Your HDD is then basically a colander full of holes and You shouldn't entrust your data to it.

As a side note, after this explanation it should be clear why it happens to be impossible to recover a file due to bad blocks but a after low level format they "vanish". This is not a magic feature of a low level format like "polishing" the plate surface with some strong magnetic field, in reality when a block allocated to a file dies, and You try to read it, the HDD has no choice but to report an error because the data is no longer there, but when You write to it (which low level format does) the block gets relocated.

For this same reason it is recommended to have HDDs holding data that is rarely accessed (typically forensics evidence HDDs) being periodically fully re-read. This forces the relocation of "weak" blocks before they become unreadable.

Let it be, if it's the same bug, you'll fix it faster and go home earlier.