RE: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin
-Original Message- you forgot to list the answers :) Waleed Having been a past sys admin, it was difficult to resist the temptation to respond to the initial post. But, since at least one person appears to have taken it as an indication of what kind of sys admin a candidate will be, I could resist no longer. This kind of questioning is sort of like expecting an Oracle DBA to walk up to a box and type out a complete CREATE DATABASE command that is appropriate for whatever version of Oracle is installed on the box. It tests the ability to memorize trivia rather than what you might expect during normal daily operations. Knowing that most facts can be looked up, I would be much more interested in the person's general philosophy of how to manage things. Is the person a control oriented person or a service oriented person? Try to determine if the person tends to take the time to do things right, or if they tend to go for the quick and dirty solution. Even though automation through scripting involves talent that most people do not have (just like most people are not talented musicians even if they learn a lot about music), I would still try to get some idea of how much talent the candidate has. Somebody who is a skilled script writer can, in effect, work 24 hours per day in surrogate form via cron. In general, I would place much less emphasis on the ability to spout off academic facts and more emphasis on practical day to day technique. I think some probing of the candidate's knowledge of backup and recovery is appropriate -- which means you kind of have to learn some of that yourself. I took the liberty of providing what I think are good answers to some of the questions. -Original Message- 1) What is an inode? Bonus: What important piece of file information is NOT stored in the inode? Might be better to ask the pros and cons and having many inodes as opposed to few; circumstances when you would not want to go with the default number you get when you create a file system (never happened when I was a sys admin). Answer: If this file system is to be used for storing an outrageous number of little files, you might consider increasing the number. In the old days when disks were expensive, and you knew that only a few big files were going on the file system, you might get a little more storage by cutting back on the inodes. I think a more practical question would be to ask how to determine if two file names refer to the same file; that is, the names are hard links. Answer: They have the same inode number as displayed by ls -i You could ask for a discussion of soft links versus hard links. For example: - soft links can refer to something on another file system; hard links can't. - a file exists as long as it has at least one hard link; a soft link can point to a non-existent file. - you can rename a file by creating a hard link, then rm the original file name; can't do that with soft links. - a soft link is essentially a file; a hard link is not. You might ask the circumstances under which the admin would AND has used soft links. In the past, I had the unpleasant experience of inheriting servers where the previous admin(s) had made extensive use of soft links resulting in boxes rife with spaghetti file systems. This usually happens because, for one reason or another, a bunch of files need to be moved from one place to another; then instead of fixing whatever uses those files to tell it to go the new location, a soft link to the new location gets created as a quick and dirty solution. These things accumulate, and eventually you have a mess and booby traps ready to blow up. 2) What is priority paging and how does it work? (mildly dated, but useful if they claim to have been around for a while) Never heard of it. Sounds like a term for a type of swapping (lazy versus not lazy). 3) What does sr stand for in vmstat output? man vmstat. vmstat Virtual Memory Statistics: (pagesize = 8192) procs memorypagesintr cpu r w u act free wire fault cow zero react pin pout in sy cs us sy id 10 1K 49 914K 279K 90K 130G 500M 1G 363 615M2 389 44K 3K 17 13 70 Ummm . got no sr here 4) How would I configure the gigabit ethernet interface to force it to be full duplex? I guess if this were a common daily activity, you would want somebody to know how to do this. For most places, you might do this ... o ... maybe once per year ... maybe. 5) How does RAID-5 work? Bonus question: how does raid-4 work? Extra-extra bonus question: how does raid-3 work? Most people will know that it involves stripe with parity; but better, I think, to ask about pros and cons of RAID-5 versus 0+1 (or 1+0). 6) What's the difference between the passwd and the shadow files? This is OK. I think I would phrase it as: What is the purpose of a shadow file. Answer: It's where the encrypted password is
RE: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin
Yeah, wellummm...yeah, okay - that was dumb of me. Here they are: 1) What is an inode? Answer: An inode is an on-disk data structure that contains information about a file. Useful things it includes are size, modification time, and number of links that point to it (among other things) Bonus: What is not included in an inode? Answer: The file name. That comes from the referencing directory entry. 2) What is priority paging and how does it work? Answer (short version): Priority paging is a workaround for an irritating VM problem on Solaris 2.6 (and 7? memory escapes me at the moment) where buffered filesystem data was considered equally valued as application memory, and so large amounts of buffered filesystem i/o could actually cause applications to be swapped out. Priority paging, enabled in the /etc/system file, modifies the paging algorithm to reduce the effects of that. It doesn't come by default in solaris 2.6 - you need to install a later kernel patch for it (105181-21? maybe? bueller?) 3)What does sr stand for in vmstat output? Answer: Scan Rate - how often the kernel is sweeping through memory space looking for pages that can be marked inactive. It is not a problem necessarily, but rather an indication of memory pressure. 4) how would I configure the gigabit ethernet interface to force it to be full duplex? Answer: ndd /dev/ge and there's like four parameters you have to set, plus turning the autoneg_cap off. 5) How does raid-5 work? Answer: According to BAARF, poorly. Raid-4? Answer: dedicated parity disk Raid-3? Answer: dedicated parity disk w/ synchronized spindles 6) Difference between passwd and shadow files? Answer: the passwd has a x where the crypted password hash would be, while the hash goes in the shadow file. That's to prevent brute-force space searches for passwords by non-root users. The side effect, though, is that now applications that authenticate users need to be setuid, which opens up other secuity holes. The moral? You can't win. 7) What's the difference between rdsk and dsk? Answer: rdsk is raw, which has two implications - one, its a character device and two, it bypasses the system buffer cache. Bonus: difference between block and character? Answer: character devices take input one character at a time, while block devices take a quantity of data. The system calls for accessing said data also differ, but its too much to write now. 8) How do journaling filesystems work? Answer: by creating a journal, or intent log, about metadata changes that are going to occur to the filesystem. When a crash occurs, the journal is replayed. 9) What's the difference between ssh and telnet? Why is one preferable over the other? Answer: ssh is encrypted, which protects not just against people sniffing your traffic, but it prevents malicious session hijacking as well. There's no justification for telnet anymore - at the point when a cisco router can run ssh, so can your servers. 10) What's the difference between the e4000 and e4500, 6000 and 6500, etc.? Answer: the backplane (and hence, processor) speed. the eX500 series runs at a 100 MHz on the backplane, while the eX000 runs at 83? (not sure). The one exception is the e6500, which runs at 90 MHz normally due to its increased centerplane length. 11) What happens on an E6500 when I add boards in the bottom two slots? Answer: the centerplane steps down again from 90 MHz to 83, making it the same speed as an E6000 at that point. The problem is the length of the centerplane and electrical latencystupid speed of light. 12) On an Sbus e-class I/O tray, what performance considerations do I have to keep in mind when I'm installing Sbus cards? Answer: even though there are three sbus slots in a Sun I/O tray, there are only two controllers. Slot 0 is its own sbus controller, and then slots 1 and 2 share one. So, distribute your heavy vs. low i/o cards accordingly. 13) Why is NIS bad? Answer: no encryption, no strong authentication, no non-repudiation - basically completely devoid of any of the major AAA (Authorization, Authentication, and Accounting) principles of security systems. 14) What's the diff between TCP and UDP? Answer: tcp is connection-oriented, has all sorts of crafty algorithms to improve performance. UDP has none of those things. 15) How does DNS work? Answer: tree-based directory infrastructure, concepts of recursion and authoritative delegation. Too much to write in this email. Bonus: Is DNS TCP or UDP? Answer: Both. DNS requests and responses smaller than 512 bytes are UDP. If for some reason a request results in a 512 byte response, the server sends back a UDP packet with the TC (truncate) bit sent and the client retries using TCP. Also, zone transfers are always TCP. Bleh. There. My secrets are revealed. Good thing I don't have to deal with Solaris much anymore. Thanks, Matt -- Matthew Zito GridApp Systems Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 646-220-3551 Phone: 212-358-8211 x 359
RE: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin
Well, the purpose of the original post was to list a set of questions that, while admittedly academic in that they involve facts, cross 1) a broad cross-section of what a sysadmin might be asked to do and 2) range from easy to difficult. The point is not to know the answer to every question, though if they do, bully for them. The point is for what they don't know, can they use related knowledge they do have to answer the question? I was always far happier when someone said something like, You know, I'm not sure what isn't stored in an inode, but because symbolic links can have their own modification time, I'm going to guess its the modification time rather than I don't know. That is a wrong answer, but the fact that he was able to logic out what is a reasonable conclusion, is the sort of thing I like in people that work for me. It's true, some of the questions are esoterica, but again, its how they answer the question. There's a post I sent that has yet to arrive (in my box anyway) where I answer the questions. For the question about full-duplex, I can't remember the flags you set either - and I'd be fine with anyone who said, You know, I'd man the ge driver and then use ndd to set what I had to. The point is they knew to look up the ge driver and use ndd. Further discussion inline 1) What is an inode? Bonus: What important piece of file information is NOT stored in the inode? Might be better to ask the pros and cons and having many inodes as opposed to few; circumstances when you would not want to go with the default number you get when you create a file system (never happened when I was a sys admin). Very pertinent info snipped You might ask the circumstances under which the admin would AND has used soft links. In the past, I had the unpleasant experience of inheriting servers where the previous admin(s) had made extensive use of soft links resulting in boxes rife with spaghetti file systems. This usually happens because, for one reason or another, a bunch of files need to be moved from one place to another; then instead of fixing whatever uses those files to tell it to go the new location, a soft link to the new location gets created as a quick and dirty solution. These things accumulate, and eventually you have a mess and booby traps ready to blow up. These are equally valid questions, but I have found that by and large, sysadmins might know from reading a book somewhere that you need one inode per file and that hard links and sym links are different, but knowing what an inode is indicates that not only are they aware of all of the above but they can in-depth explain what is happening to the system. 2) What is priority paging and how does it work? (mildly dated, but useful if they claim to have been around for a while) Never heard of it. Sounds like a term for a type of swapping (lazy versus not lazy). Solaris-ism with 2.6 (the original question was for a Solaris admin) 3) What does sr stand for in vmstat output? man vmstat. vmstat Virtual Memory Statistics: (pagesize = 8192) procs memorypages intr cpu r w u act free wire fault cow zero react pin pout in sy cs us sy id 10 1K 49 914K 279K 90K 130G 500M 1G 363 615M2 389 44K 3K 17 13 70 Ummm . got no sr here Apparently you're not on a Solaris system - count yourself lucky. ;) 4) How would I configure the gigabit ethernet interface to force it to be full duplex? I guess if this were a common daily activity, you would want somebody to know how to do this. For most places, you might do this ... o ... maybe once per year ... maybe. I concur - but knowing that you use ndd to get/set network device driver parameters is the real thrust of the question. Asking about gigabit specifically gets into the process. I found that if I asked: How do you get/set network driver parameters in Solaris? The answer I would inevitably get was either I don't know or ndd . Throwing the part in about gigabit makes them think through the whole process, and watching people talk through how they would do something they are unfamiliar with, even in general principles, is very valuable. 5) How does RAID-5 work? Bonus question: how does raid-4 work? Extra-extra bonus question: how does raid-3 work? Most people will know that it involves stripe with parity; but better, I think, to ask about pros and cons of RAID-5 versus 0+1 (or 1+0). Good point. I usually use that as a follow-up question. 6) What's the difference between the passwd and the shadow files? This is OK. I think I would phrase it as: What is the purpose of a shadow file. Answer: It's where the encrypted password is (or can be) stored and is readable only by root. passwd file is world readable. If the encrypted password is visible, it makes it easier to run a cracker against it to
RE: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin
question #1: Do you realize that your DBA is a God, and you will obey his/her edicts without question? question #2: Are you aware of the daily offering of food/beer required to keep in your God's (DBA's) good graces? etc... Scott Shafer San Antonio, TX 210.581.6217 -Original Message- From: M.Godlewski [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 1:30 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin I've been asked to interview a system admin candidate for our Solaris shop. I've search Google and altavista, but haven't come up with any after 1999 interview questions. Does anyone have a list of interview question or a link to some? tia M _ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search http://us.rd.yahoo.com/search/mailsig/*http://search.yahoo.com - Faster. Easier. Bingo. -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California-- Mailing list and web hosting services - To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
Re: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin
I've been in the same situation, I had to interview the company's sysadmin, though I am not one. Here you have a few points to start your list. Regards Gabriel The candidate must provide knolwedge about (how to's): 1. Start and stop a solaris system, including several levels of boot (1,2,3, etc). 2. Patch installation. 3. App's installation and configuration (kernel and semaphores). 4. Users creation. 5. Partitions creation. 6. Mount and unmount FileSystems. 7. DNS, IP configuration. 8. Monitoring and performance tuning (process, priorities, memory, disk, etc). 9. Services configuration SMTP, FTP, Internet, secure conections (HTTP, HTTPs). 10. Scripts programming. 11. Establish backup/recovery strategies. Plus: - Define Sun equipment architecture. --- M.Godlewski [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've been asked to interview a system admin candidate for our Solaris shop. I've search Google and altavista, but haven't come up with any after 1999 interview questions. Does anyone have a list of interview question or a link to some? tia M - Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. __ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: Gabriel Aragon INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California-- Mailing list and web hosting services - To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
RE: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin
Okay, here are my favorites for senior candidates (I'm giving all my secrets away...): 1) What is an inode? Bonus: What important piece of file information is NOT stored in the inode? 2) What is priority paging and how does it work? (mildly dated, but useful if they claim to have been around for a while) 3) What does sr stand for in vmstat output? 4) How would I configure the gigabit ethernet interface to force it to be full duplex? 5) How does RAID-5 work? Bonus question: how does raid-4 work? Extra-extra bonus question: how does raid-3 work? 6) What's the difference between the passwd and the shadow files? 7) What's the difference between the dsk and rdsk devices in /dev? Bonus question: what's the difference between a block and a character device? 8) How do journaling filesystems work? 9) What's the difference between ssh and telnet? Why is one preferable over the other? 10) What's the difference between the e4000 and the e4500 (or e6000 and e6500, etc. - also a bit dated, but there's still a million of the things out there) 11) What happens on an E6500 when I add boards in the bottom two slots? (I won't ask this if the person has never touched an E6500) 12) On an Sbus e-class I/O tray, what performance considerations do I have to keep in mind when I'm installing Sbus cards? 13) Why is NIS bad? 14) What's the difference between TCP and UDP? 15) How does DNS work? Bonus question: is DNS TCP or UDP? Then I usually throw in some amorphous questions: tell me about a performance problem you tracked down and solved, how do you normally secure a freshly installed Solaris server, etc. Then I follow up with product specific questions - oracle, sun cluster, veritas volume manager, storage, etc. Thanks, Matt -- Matthew Zito GridApp Systems Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 646-220-3551 Phone: 212-358-8211 x 359 http://www.gridapp.com -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 1:44 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: RE: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin question #1: Do you realize that your DBA is a God, and you will obey his/her edicts without question? question #2: Are you aware of the daily offering of food/beer required to keep in your God's (DBA's) good graces? etc... Scott Shafer San Antonio, TX 210.581.6217 -Original Message- From: M.Godlewski [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 1:30 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject:Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin I've been asked to interview a system admin candidate for our Solaris shop. I've search Google and altavista, but haven't come up with any after 1999 interview questions. Does anyone have a list of interview question or a link to some? tia M _ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search http://us.rd.yahoo.com/search/mailsig/*http://search.yahoo.com - Faster. Easier. Bingo. -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California-- Mailing list and web hosting services - To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: Matthew Zito INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California-- Mailing list and web hosting services - To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
RE: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin
These are nice questions. I'm not sure how I would identify if they are technical enough to handle the job though.[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: question #1: Do you realize that your DBA is a God, and you will obeyhis/her edicts without question?question #2: Are you aware of the daily offering of food/beer required tokeep in your God's (DBA's) good graces?etc...Scott ShaferSan Antonio, TX210.581.6217 -Original Message- From: M.Godlewski [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 1:30 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin I've been asked to interview a system admin candidate for our Solaris shop. I've search Google and altavista, but haven't come up with any after 1999 interview questions. Does anyone have a list of interview question or a link to some?tia ! M _ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.-- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net-- Author: INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.comSan Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services-To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail messageto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and inthe message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L(or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You mayalso send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
RE: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin
You only spend time on the technical stuff if they pass this round. Scott Shafer San Antonio, TX 210.581.6217 -Original Message- From: M.Godlewski [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 2:20 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: RE: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin These are nice questions. I'm not sure how I would identify if they are technical enough to handle the job though. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: question #1: Do you realize that your DBA is a God, and you will obey his/her edicts without question? question #2: Are you aware of the daily offering of food/beer required to keep in your God's (DBA's) good graces? etc... Scott Shafer San Antonio, TX 210.581.6217 -Original Message- From: M.Godlewski [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 1:30 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin I've been asked to interview a system admin candidate for our Solaris shop. I've search Google and altavista, but haven't come up with any after 1999 interview questions. Does anyone have a list of interview question or a link to some? tia ! M _ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services - To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). _ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search http://us.rd.yahoo.com/search/mailsig/*http://search.yahoo.com - Faster. Easier. Bingo. -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California-- Mailing list and web hosting services - To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
RE: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin
Matthew, Thanks for the list of questions.Matthew Zito [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Okay, here are my favorites for senior candidates (I'm giving all mysecrets away...):1) What is an inode? Bonus: What important piece of file information isNOT stored in the inode?2) What is priority paging and how does it work? (mildly dated, butuseful if they claim to have been around for a while)3) What does sr stand for in vmstat output?4) How would I configure the gigabit ethernet interface to force it tobe full duplex?5) How does RAID-5 work? Bonus question: how does raid-4 work?Extra-extra bonus question: how does raid-3 work?6) What's the difference between the passwd and the shadow files?7) What's the difference between the dsk and rdsk devices in /dev? Bonusquestion: what's the difference between a block and a character device?8) How do journaling filesystems work?9) What's the difference between ss! h and telnet? Why is one preferableover the other?10) What's the difference between the e4000 and the e4500 (or e6000 ande6500, etc. - also a bit dated, but there's still a million of thethings out there)11) What happens on an E6500 when I add boards in the bottom two slots?(I won't ask this if the person has never touched an E6500)12) On an Sbus e-class I/O tray, what performance considerations do Ihave to keep in mind when I'm installing Sbus cards?13) Why is NIS bad?14) What's the difference between TCP and UDP? 15) How does DNS work? Bonus question: is DNS TCP or UDP?Then I usually throw in some amorphous questions: tell me about aperformance problem you tracked down and solved, how do you normallysecure a freshly installed Solaris server, etc. Then I follow up withproduct specific questions - oracle, sun cluster, veritas volumemanager, storage, etc. Thanks,Matt--Matthew ZitoGridApp SystemsEmail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Cell: 646-220-3551Phone: 212-358-8211 x 359http://www.gridapp.com -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 1:44 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: RE: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin question #1: Do you realize that your DBA is a God, and you will obey his/her edicts without question? question #2: Are you aware of the daily offering of food/beer required to keep in your God's (DBA's) good graces? etc... Scott Shafer San Antonio, TX 210.581.6217-Original Message- From: M.Godlewski [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 1:30 PM! To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System AdminI've been asked to interview a system admin candidate for our Solaris shop. I've search Google and altavista, but haven't come up with any after 1999 interview questions. Does anyone have a list of interview question or a link to some?tiaM_Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services - To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net-- Author: Matthew ZitoINET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.comSan Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services-To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail messageto: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and inthe message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L(or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You mayalso send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
RE: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin
you forgot to list the answers :) Waleed -Original Message- Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 3:14 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Okay, here are my favorites for senior candidates (I'm giving all my secrets away...): 1) What is an inode? Bonus: What important piece of file information is NOT stored in the inode? 2) What is priority paging and how does it work? (mildly dated, but useful if they claim to have been around for a while) 3) What does sr stand for in vmstat output? 4) How would I configure the gigabit ethernet interface to force it to be full duplex? 5) How does RAID-5 work? Bonus question: how does raid-4 work? Extra-extra bonus question: how does raid-3 work? 6) What's the difference between the passwd and the shadow files? 7) What's the difference between the dsk and rdsk devices in /dev? Bonus question: what's the difference between a block and a character device? 8) How do journaling filesystems work? 9) What's the difference between ssh and telnet? Why is one preferable over the other? 10) What's the difference between the e4000 and the e4500 (or e6000 and e6500, etc. - also a bit dated, but there's still a million of the things out there) 11) What happens on an E6500 when I add boards in the bottom two slots? (I won't ask this if the person has never touched an E6500) 12) On an Sbus e-class I/O tray, what performance considerations do I have to keep in mind when I'm installing Sbus cards? 13) Why is NIS bad? 14) What's the difference between TCP and UDP? 15) How does DNS work? Bonus question: is DNS TCP or UDP? Then I usually throw in some amorphous questions: tell me about a performance problem you tracked down and solved, how do you normally secure a freshly installed Solaris server, etc. Then I follow up with product specific questions - oracle, sun cluster, veritas volume manager, storage, etc. Thanks, Matt -- Matthew Zito GridApp Systems Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 646-220-3551 Phone: 212-358-8211 x 359 http://www.gridapp.com -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 1:44 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: RE: Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin question #1: Do you realize that your DBA is a God, and you will obey his/her edicts without question? question #2: Are you aware of the daily offering of food/beer required to keep in your God's (DBA's) good graces? etc... Scott Shafer San Antonio, TX 210.581.6217 -Original Message- From: M.Godlewski [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 1:30 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject:Interview Questions for a Unix Solaris System Admin I've been asked to interview a system admin candidate for our Solaris shop. I've search Google and altavista, but haven't come up with any after 1999 interview questions. Does anyone have a list of interview question or a link to some? tia M _ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search http://us.rd.yahoo.com/search/mailsig/*http://search.yahoo.com - Faster. Easier. Bingo. -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California-- Mailing list and web hosting services - To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: Matthew Zito INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California-- Mailing list and web hosting services - To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: Khedr, Waleed INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services-- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California-- Mailing list and web hosting services - To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru
