Sysadmin Interview Questions (circa 2000)

At one of the not-swift places places I worked that had a high turnover rate, we put together the following set of interview questions. The most important and basically operative interview question was the last one in the list.


In order to have a successful interview at our-company, you  must be able to answer the following questions correctly:

1. What kinds of files are generally kept in /tmp?
  a) files that could be erased
  b) important records and sensitive market data that need to saved
  c) binaries
  d) comma files (bonus points for describing what comma files are)
  e) personal mail you'd rather your manager not read

2. What are files ending in the extension .o used for?

3. Scenario:
  Let's say there is a program which hogs resources and occasionally
  doesn't complete. What should be done?

  a) understand why it doesn't complete and possibly fix
  b) run it from crontab every 15 minutes
  c) reboot

4. Scenario:
    Let's say there is a mail reader that corrupts the mailbox when /tmp
    fills up. How would you deal with this situation?

  a) fix the mail reader
  b) use another mail reader
  c) use existing SNMP monitors to check for filesystems which are more than
     95% full
  d) increase /tmp
  e) reboot
  f) remember what you did to fix the corrupted file the last time you had this
     problem so you could quickly do it again

5. What are the important options of the AIX shutdown command?

6. What is the best program editor ever created?
  a) more
  b) cat
  c) vi

7. Essay: discuss the advantages of rebooting hundreds of servers at one time.
  [Hint: Make sure you include ease of remembering and quickness of pain]

8. Are you a light sleeper?

Answers:

1. all except a. See also question 4.
A comma file is the predecessor to the "dot" file e.g. ,profile ,login ,rhosts. Comma comes before dot in the ASCII collating sequence. As predecessor, it doesn't have the feature that dot files have of not being expanded by metacharacters

It is used by applications programmers to make Korn shell code look more sophisticated. For example:

  cat </dev/null>,verbose

2. This is a silly question because at our company, the concept of a filetype or class of file doesn't exist. However some Systems  Administrators use .o for the extension on backup copies or "old" copies of a file. It is handy to use because some programs the C  compiler and some Makefiles will remove them for you automatically.

3. b. And also every 5 minutes

4. d. e & f are only for Senior System Administrators

5. -F 0. [fast,  wait 0 seconds] Some applicants will proffer -r (reboot),  but that is optional.

6. A trick question: SA's don't program.

7. You can test not only the hardware but also the network as all the
   servers try make connection with the single nameserver. It might
   simulate what would happen during a nuclear attack.

8. SA's never sleep!