Blackport Institute of Technology

Passing a course	$600 – $900 in Lab Credits
Passing with distinction	+50%
Completing a diploma	+$1,200
Graduating (every diploma)	+$5,000
Every certificate, permanently	10–15% off the hardware that course covers

Where the watts come from, what happens when they stop, and why two of something is not automatically redundancy.

The path to the grid — Almost every 'my device does nothing' report is a broken path rather than a broken device. Reading the path yourself is faster than any diagnostic panel.
PDUs and headroom — Sizing against idle draw is the classic mistake. The rack works perfectly until the moment everything is busy at once, which is exactly when you need it.
What a UPS actually buys you — Outages in this game are real events with a duration. A UPS converts an outage from 'everything stopped and uptime broke' into 'nothing noticed'.
Redundancy that is not redundancy — The Redundancy panel scores weak points for exactly this reason. A high device count with one shared root is a rack that looks robust and is not.

Pass at 70%, distinction at 90%. Pays $600, or $900 with distinction, and takes 10% off pdu and ups hardware permanently.

Heat is the tax on everything profitable you do. What raises it, what removes it, and how it turns into wear.

Where heat comes from — It explains the single most confusing thing in the game: a device you 'turned on' reading stone cold. It is not broken; it is not powered.
Heat becomes wear — This is why cooling is an economic decision rather than a cosmetic one. Every degree you remove is wear you never pay for.
Cooling modules, and their limits — Buying up a tier replaces the old one's effect rather than adding to it, so the upgrade path is 'replace', not 'accumulate'.
Maintenance versus repair — A rack that is never maintained does not degrade gracefully — it runs fine, then faults, then costs you a repair and the uptime along with it.

Pass at 70%, distinction at 90%. Pays $700, or $1,050 with distinction, and takes 15% off cooling hardware permanently.

Getting a device genuinely online: the difference between a cable, a link, a lease and a route.

Cable, link, lease, route — 'It has a cable, why is it offline' is the single most common networking confusion, and the answer is always one of the other three.
DHCP and leases — Pool exhaustion is silent and looks exactly like a cabling fault, right down to the device sitting there doing nothing.
Switches, routers and firewalls — Reaching for the wrong one wastes money and does not fix the symptom — adding a switch never gets you online, and a router does not give you more rack ports.

Pass at 70%, distinction at 90%. Pays $600, or $900 with distinction, and takes 10% off switch and router hardware permanently.

Shares, capacity, mirrors and staleness — and the difference between a backup and a second copy of the same mistake.

Shares and capacity — A full share does not degrade politely — the things depending on it stop working, and the cause is one screen away from where the symptom appears.
A mirror is not a backup — Knowing which failure you are actually protected against is the whole point of having a second copy at all.
Staleness, the silent failure — This is the failure that costs people real data: they had a backup, it stopped working weeks ago, and nothing told them.

Pass at 70%, distinction at 90%. Pays $700, or $1,050 with distinction, and takes 10% off nas hardware permanently.

Heat, intrusions, ransomware and the social attacks that no firewall stops.

Heat and attention — It is the game's difficulty dial and you control it. Earning hard raises your own risk, deliberately.
Firewall posture — Posture, not ownership, is what the intrusion roll checks. Buying the box is not the same as being defended.
Ransomware, and paying — You should be choosing between routes on their merits, with the costs of each stated plainly.
The attack no firewall stops — It is the one in-game threat that maps directly onto something real, and it is deliberately built so that the safe answer is the same one you would give in real life.

Pass at 75%, distinction at 92%. Pays $900, or $1,350 with distinction, and takes 15% off firewall hardware permanently.

Standing in somebody else's rack on a clock: the way in, what a take costs you, and why leaving is the hard part.

You come in the front door — It is what makes a rack's shape matter. A rack where everything hangs off one switch is a short walk to the money. A rig sitting two switches deep behind a firewall is a longer, louder one.
Carried, not banked — It is the rule the entire feature is built on. It makes greed self-punishing with the same mechanic that rewards it -- one more device stops being free.
Money frozen, topology live — The two halves answer different questions. Spending your way out does not work, because the pot was fixed before you started. Pulling a plug does work, and lands within seconds.
The loud thing is the thing that pins you — You cannot take anything without announcing roughly where you are. That is the trade the whole raid turns on.
When they turn and fight — It gives the defender something to do that is not simply pulling a plug, and it makes fighting more attractive than always cutting power.

Pass at 75%, distinction at 92%. Pays $600, or $900 with distinction, and takes 15% off comm device hardware permanently.

The shell that runs the rack: what each command needs before it will work, and how to make it run without you.

Four gates, four different refusals — The refusal message IS the diagnosis. Reading which gate you hit tells you what to go and fix, without guessing.
The filesystem is real storage — Scripts, logs and notes all live here, so filling the share is a real failure mode rather than a cosmetic one.
run versus source — Most 'my script did nothing' problems are a run that should have been a source, or a run that was never dry-run first.
Conditions and exit codes — A script that does not check whether the network is up will happily run its whole body against a dead rack and report success.
Automation belongs to a terminal — Anything you do on a timer -- health checks, service restarts, log sweeps -- stops needing you.

Pass at 75%, distinction at 92%. Pays $900, or $1,350 with distinction, and takes 15% off terminal server hardware permanently.

Passing an Exam Pays