If you have an interview coming up for a Linux System Admin or DevOps position, here’s a great list of potential questions you might be asked. This is not the entire list as it’s very long.
To get your own PDF and printable copy of the full list of questions, scroll to the bottom of the page.
Enjoy!
General Questions:
- What did you learn yesterday/this week?
- Talk about your preferred development/administration environment. (OS, Editor, Browsers, Tools etc.)
- Tell me about the last major Linux project you finished.
Simple Linux Questions:
- What is the name and the UID of the administrator user?
- How do you list all files, including hidden ones, in a directory?
- What is the Linux command to remove a directory and its contents?
Medium Linux Questions:
- What do the following commands do, and how would you use them?
teeawk
Hard Linux Questions:
- What is a tunnel and how can you bypass an HTTP proxy?
- What is the difference between an IDS and an IPS?
- What shortcuts do you use on a regular basis?
Expert Linux Questions:
- A running process gets EAGAIN: Resource temporarily unavailable on reading a socket. How can you close this bad socket/file descriptor without killing the process?
- What do you control with swapiness?
- How do you change TCP stack buffers? How do you calculate it?
Networking Questions:
- What is localhost and why would ping localhost fail?
- What is the similarity between “ping” & “traceroute” ? How is traceroute able to find the hops.
- What command or commands can be used to show all open ports and/or socket connections on a machine?
MySQL questions:
- How do you create a user?
- How do you provide privileges to a user?
- What is the difference between a “left” and a “right” join?
DevOps Questions:
- Can you describe your workflow when you create a script?
- What is git?
- What is a dynamically linked file?
Fun Questions:
- A careless sysadmin executes the following command:
chmod 444 /bin/chmod. How would you fix this? - You’ve lost the root password. What would you do?
- I’ve rebooted a remote server, but after 10 minutes, I’m still not able to ssh into it. What could be wrong?
Demonstrations:
- Unpack test.tar.gz without man pages or google.
- Remove all “*.pyc” files from testdir recursively.
- Search for “my fu is the best” in all *.py files.