Objective 3) Thaw Frost Tower's Entrance

Difficulty:

Turn up the heat to defrost the entrance to Frost Tower. Click on the Items tab in your badge to find a link to the Wifi Dongle's CLI interface. Talk to Greasy Gopherguts outside the tower for tips.

Hints and Resources

Hints provided after helping Greasy GopherGuts and completing the Grepping for Gold Terminal Challenge

Linux Wi-Fi Commands
The iwlist and iwconfig utilities are key for managing Wi-Fi from the Linux command line.

Web Browsing with cURL
cURL makes HTTP requests from a terminal - in Mac, Linux, and modern Windows!

Adding Data to cURL Requests
When sending a POST request with data, add --data-binary to your curl command followed by the data you want to send.

Troll Introduction

Talk to Grimy McTrollkins outside of the Frost Tower

Yo, I'm Grimy McTrollkins.
I'm a troll and I work for the big guy over there: Jack Frost.
I’d rather not be bothered talking with you, but I’m kind of in a bind and need your help.
Jack Frost is so obsessed with icy cold that he accidentally froze shut the door to Frost Tower!
I wonder if you can help me get back in.
I think we can melt the door open if we can just get access to the thermostat inside the building.
That thermostat uses Wi-Fi. And I’ll bet you picked up a Wi-Fi adapter for your badge when you got to the North Pole.
Click on your badge and go to the Items tab. There, you should see your Wi-Fi Dongle and a button to “Open Wi-Fi CLI.” That’ll give you command-line interface access to your badge’s wireless capabilities.

Solution

Open the WiFi Dongle in the Items section in your badge while standing near the Frost Tower entrance.

Screenshot

The first step is to get connected via WiFi to the thermostat. First we should determine what our local WiFi adapter is with
iwconfig

Then, look for any local WiFi networks with
iwlist wlan0 scanning.

This tells us that the name of the nearby WiFi network is FROST-Nidus-Setup. Connect to it with
iwconfig wlan0 essid "FROST-Nidus-Setup"

Screenshot

After connecting to the FROST-Nidus-Setup network we recived a message that we should go to http://nidus-setup:8080/ to complete setup.
curl http://nidus-setup:8080

Screenshot

That page gives us the path to the API documentation
curl http://nidus-setup:8080/apidoc/

Screenshot

From the API documentation we learn that the command to set the temperature is
curl -XPOST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' --data-binary '{"temperature":42}' http://nidus-setup:8080/api/cooler

Screenshot

Completion

Setting the temperature to any value above 0 completes the challenge.

Grimy McTrollkins

Great - now I can get back in!