I want to know top questions asked in the interviews for a 2 yrs experienced Linux System Administrator. Pls help me what topic should I study to crack the interviews. I am totally confused while looking them on the internet.

The first thing you should do is to read the LQ Rules and "Question Guidelines". This question has been asked (and ANSWERED) MANY times on this forum, and if you searched, you'd have found answers.

We will tell you the same thing we have told everyone else over the years: an interviewer can ask you ANYTHING THEY WANT and accept ANY ANSWER THEY WANT. There is no 'script', formula, etc. There are no 'top questions'. If you are going for an interview, the only thing you can do to pass it is to actually KNOW what you're doing, and possess the skills the company is looking for. If you don't, don't bother going, and don't try to cheat your way through an interview. What do you think is going to happen if you *DO* manage to get a job in this way?? You won't have the knowledge to actually perform that job if you get it, and it's going to be real clear, real quick.

Also, if you want to be taken seriously in a professional environment, don't use text speak ever, for anything. It's "Please" not "pls".

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If you know what they use, expect questions on that. Everyone has their different favourites, but they will test knowledge of Apache, their mail program, dns, security and so forth. I was once asked about resizing disks & dns glue records. I didn't get the job, needless to say.

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One of the chief problems we have these days is that too many jobs are being done by people who are brilliant at interviews, and too few by people who are actually any good at the job!

Exactly because of people/situations like this. Like the folks who do dumps of certification tests, until they memorize the ANSWERS and can squeak by and get a 'certification', or because someone gives them answers/suggestions as to how to answer in an interview. Then, these folks get a job, and have no idea how to actually *DO THE WORK* the job entails.

It's more amazing to me that they don't think about this beforehand, and think about how quickly they'll get fired because of the lack of skills/knowledge they have, as opposed to what they actually *DO* have. Such things follow you...I know I follow up on references a LOT, and hardly ever talk to the person they list on the resume, but will call HR directly, and ask for the head of department XXX to verify employment and check reference. I've caught MANY who give their friends names as their 'boss'. When talking to the ACTUAL supervisor, I get a VERY different story.

We all need to eat, and we can't eat unless we have a job, and we can't get a job unless we sell interviewers on our capabilities.

So please (and not pls!) let amperenaushad eat.

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Sorry, but no one is preventing this person from getting a job and 'eating'. SELLING yourself on an interview is one thing...faking knowledge is another. If you don't KNOW the answers to the questions the interviewer is asking, and you just parrot something back with good 'person skills' and land a job, you are doing a disservice to the company AND YOURSELF. ALL of us have known (and know) many people who are very slick in person, with lots of charm and smooth answers, and can 'sell the interviewer' on them being the right person for a task. And when they can't do the job past one or two questions, what then??

Do you think that amperenaushad is going to eat in six months, after getting fired from a job they didn't have the skills to do, after passing an interview with answers that are just recited? How do you think that black mark on the resume will affect their chances to 'eat' after that? Sorry, it may sound harsh, but if you don't have the knowledge to sit down and answer pretty much ANY question with a decent answer, you're not qualified for the job, period.

Bear in mind that "I don't know" is a perfectly acceptable answer, if you follow it up with something like "..but I'd start to troubleshoot it by doing X, Y, and Z, and seeing where that took me. This isn't something I have experience with, honestly, but I'd learn it and do my best to get it fixed." I'd rather have that person, as opposed to "I'd do A"...which they got from a forum/test/whatever, and don't actually know what A IS OR DOES, nor what the "B, C, D, etc." are to follow it, if A doesn't work.

You said it best..amperenaushad needs to sell their capabilities...NOT OURS, not things they don't know, not things that they get in advance.

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@amperenaushad: You never replied to your first thread post:
I want to know how to enable root privilege by default for users in Linux Redhat 7

Answer to what interviewers ask: What have you DONE with Linux?

Do you have a computer with at least 2G ram? And an adequate internet connection?
Then, download VirtualBox[.org], and a lot of .iso's (from e.g. DistroWatch[.com]).
Then, build a complex net of VMs and try MANY things which you find by searching the web.
But don't post questions UNTIL you work thru them by yourself.
Then, and only then, you will have the answers which interviewers ask for.

Your use of LQ is "FORCING"[?] people to waste their time on you
(when those people could be helping others and ME)!

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@TBOne Completely agree. While one always needs an opportunity, one better work hard and learn to make it worthwhile, and I feel appreciate any earnest guidance they may receive from others

that is what LQ is for .. lol
right?

TBOne, Thanks for inspection...

I have not forced you to answer. Please don't waste your precious time on ME.

Wrong. It's for answering questions and sharing knowledge, but NOT someplace to come and get each and every task done/answered for you to be able to do the JOB you were hired to do, on a daily/hourly basis. The occasional question and clarification? Sure. Stuck on something? Absolutely. Discovered something new and handy? Great place to share.

Every day with "I got hired for xxx and don't know how to do this. HELP!"...not so much. Or do you think your co-workers/boss will enjoy having to wait hours/days before someone in a forum answers a question, before they can get you to do anything?

hahaha I was being facetious
why did I know someone would take that seriously?

it'd be called doing all of their work for them not not getting paid for it.

I've been through some pretty strange interviews, and I've tried to use that to guide the interviews that from time to time I do.

Mostly, I present a somewhat-hypothetical version of a real problem that this person might be tasked to do, and I ask them how they would proceed. Most of the time, I get "technically correct-enough" answers to these things.

But, I am actually, behind the scenes, looking for (and, looking at ...) more than this. I want to get a sense of whether or not this person could work well on a team. If this person thinks that something ought to be done, will he "simply go and do it?" If he thinks that something should be different, will he "simply go and change it?" Does he appear to be thinking about the problem that I presented in depth, or is he just grabbing the low-hanging fruit.

For instance, I once began a question with, "Well, here we have an internal network at 192.168.100.x and we want to make it available to our road warriors ..." I paused a little bit during the question. The candidate waited patiently for me to finish, then thought a few moments, and replied, "Well, first of all, you should choose a different address range for your internal network," and proceeded to (reason omitted) briefly tell me why. Then, after briefly summarizing the question I had asked, he provided a serviceable answer.

I asked a more off-the-wall question and, again after a moment, he simply replied, "I'm sorry, but I don't know the answer to that." He continued to look me in the eye. I nodded and continued, "If you were faced with that question, then, and given that you didn't know, what do you think that you would do next?" He remembered that I had previously described a few of his hypothetical team-mates; in fact, he had jotted them down. He looked at his notes and said, "I think that I would ask Kevin." I nodded, pursuing, "Yes, and what sort of thing would you ask him, or ask him to do?"

Needless to say, this person got my recommendation, and he has worked out well. (He has, in a word, proved to be a professional.)

Right now, we've got a lot of refugees from "No Child Left Behind™" in the United States who believe that everything in life is a multiple-choice question for which there is "one right answer," and that your number-one objective is simply to find and regurgitate that one answer. They do not think in depth because they've never been trained to: the "one right answer" was necessarily sitting there on the page (or, the computer screen) in front of them, and all they had to do was to pick it out. Furthermore, they were always in competition with other students: almost never were they trained to cooperate much less to collaborate with them. Whereas, in the workplace, that's what you must do constantly.

"NCLB" trained you that you had to know everything yourself, and to do everything yourself, and it never once exposed you to a situation where you didn't and couldn't. It rewarded you for your every (self-contained) success, and, so as not to harm your fragile ego, also for every failure. And "it was always about you." You succeeded alone, or didn't succeed alone, and were rewarded alone. Today's education system is not about "us." But every workplace is. You succeed in school only if you are "the smartest kid in school" or if you think that you are or if you assume that you must be. But, that's not how you succeed on a job.

You're not going to find the things that I might ask you in anyone's "exam prep" handbook, because I'm not giving you an exam. I'm evaluating whether you'll be a good co-worker, and a good part of someone's team, or if instead you'll be an a*shole that nobody will want to admit to having ever hired or recommended.

I'm never "quizzing you," nor asking you questions "to watch you squirm," although I will certainly take notice of how and when you do squirm; exactly what do you do when you are out of your circumscribed comfort-zone (as you very often will be, on any job). I'm going to lead you a little bit out of your comfort zone, if only to ascertain if you've ever been there before, but if need be I will lead you back in. Anyhow, I will never ask you brain-teasers nor unrelated "Mensa questions," and I suggest that you simply walk out of any interview that ever does.

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