I have moderate Linux experience myself, but must interview some candidates for some Linux Administration positions. I was wondering if anyone out there could offer up some good moderate to advanced Linux administration questions fit for an interview. I think I have all the basic ones I need. I am looking for either "right or wrong" questions, or scenarios. Accompanying answers would also be greatly appreciated, or at least, what you would look for in an answer.

Thanks All
Geoff

That's a rather complex task, considering that MANY
things in Linux/Unix are distro dependent ... as I learnt
just the other week RH has even made extensions to
useradd (the -r flag). Commands like tar are out there
in several versions/flavours. How about giving a rough
idea of the environment, and what the tasks in question
would be? Or if asking for tasks is too specific, what are
the machines the admin is going to look after doing?



Best regards,
Tink

I'm going out on a limb here since I see you have Red Hat listed and that is my distro of choice.
I would use mostly command line questions as any Windows user can figure out the click click thingys.

For example...

From the command: chkconfig --list iptables I see that level1 shows iptables as being off. This is a big security problem isn't it? Why or Why not?

Answer: Not a problem as networking is off in level1 and you are not connected to any other machines.

How do I determine the Linux version that I am using?

Answer: uname -r Remember that Linux refers to the kernel

How do I determine the Red Hat version that I am using?

Answer: type the command cat /etc/redhat-release or browse to that directory and view the file directly.

List two commands to find the hardware address of eth0

Answer:ifconfig eth0 and ip addr

List the steps to create a partition using fdisk and format it as ext3


Check around on the forum and I bet you could find a lot of ideas.

Hey Tink good point... All Red Hat 9 servers, not logged into X, they are mostly hosting in house apps. Pretty stripped down. Hardened with Bastille. There are 8 boxes for these in particular, and they all have both private and public interfaces for the network. They have no firewall on them, as they are protected by perimeter devices. ummmm... geez that should help. These people will need to have solid administration from a day-to-day aspect. They should be expected to trouble shoot faults, understand syslog info, tweak and tune, and so on. Does that help? The post right above has some good questions. Thanks for the response, I appreciate your time!

-Geoff

Hi,

Welcome to LQ!

Please look at the original post date. Do not resurrect old threads. Especially that many years and your post not really relevant nor constructive to the original.
Resurrecting old threads this way helps no one.

Honestly, I don't find the "pop quiz" interviewing method to be helpful at all. You're just checking to see who is good at memorizing things, and typically the people who are good creative, logical thinkers (in other words, the ones you want) are people who ignore memorization except for the stuff they use often, because hey... there's the man pages right there.

Then there's always the problem where someone who isn't that technical ends up using the pop quiz, and the candidate gives a perfectly correct answer that wasn't on the answer sheet. For example, the Linux kernel version could also be obtained from the top line of /var/log/boot.msg. And unless you have 30 interfaces, you can just as easily issue ifconfig without the eth0 argument to get the hardware address. The point is, there is more than one way to skin a cat.

If I'm interviewing an experienced Linux sysadmin candidate, these are the questions I'm interested in:

- What OSs have you supported?
- What application environments did you support?
- What level of troubleshooting/support did you provide to application programmers / DBAs?
- What was your storage solution?
- How did you manage OS patching?
- What was your HA/DR strategy?

This makes it an open format, and what you're looking for is someone who:

- Has demonstrated skills comparable to what you're looking for.
- Can critically assess the strengths and weaknesses of strategies employed at other sites, and can even offer improvements in your own site's current strategies.
- Will honestly acknowledge areas of weakness in their own skill sets, and doesn't try to bullshit.

Granted, I've only ever done it once, but it landed me a top candidate.

OHH> Old post.

The post I was complaining about has been removed. Therefore, this post has been removed too.