A collection of Linux Sysadmin Test Questions and Answers. Test your knowledge and skills in different fields with these Q/A.
"A great Admin doesn't need to know everything, but they should be able to come up with amazing solutions to impossible projects." - cwheeler33 (ServerFault)
"My skills are making things work, not knowing a billion facts. [...] If I need to fix a system I’ll identify the problem, check the logs and look up the errors. If I need to implement a solution I’ll research the right solution, implement and document it, the later on only really have a general idea of how it works unless I interact with it frequently... it’s why it’s documented." - Sparcrypt (Reddit)
Created by trimstray and contributors
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Table of Contents
| The type of chapter | Number of questions | Short description |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | ||
| 14 questions | Relaxed, fun and simple - are great for starting everything. | |
| General Knowledge | ||
| 65 questions | Reasonably simple and straight based on basic knowledge. | |
| 94 questions | The mid level of questions if that you have sound knowledge. | |
| 99 questions | Hard questions and riddles. Check it if you want to be good. | |
| Secret Knowledge | ||
| 12 questions | Really deep questions are to get to know Guru Sysadmin. |
Introduction
💠 Simple Questions
- What did you learn this week?
- What excites or interests you about the sysadmin world?
- What is a recent technical challenge you experienced and how did you solve it?
- Tell me about the last major project you finished.
- Do you contribute to any open source projects?
- Describe the setup of your homelab.
- What personal achievement are you most proud of?
- Tell me about the biggest mistake you've made. How would you do it differently today?
- What software tools are you going to install on the first day at a new job?
- Tell me about how you manage your knowledge database (e.g. wikis, files, portals).
- What news sources do you check daily? (sysadmin, security-related or other)
- Your NOC team has a new budget for sysadmin certifications. What certificate would you like and why?
- How do you interact with developers: us vs. them or all pulling together with a different approach?
- Which sysadmin question would you ask, if you were interviewing me, to know, how good I'm with non-standard situations?
General Knowledge
💠 Junior Sysadmin
System Questions (37)
Give some examples of Linux distribution. What is your favorite distro and why?
What are the differences between Unix, Linux, BSD, and GNU?
What is a CLI? Tell me about your favorite CLI tools, tips, and hacks.
What is your favorite shell and why?
How do you get help on the command line? ***
Your first 5 commands on a *nix server after login.
What do the fields in ls -al output mean?
How do you get a list of logged-in users?
What is the advantage of executing the running processes in the background? How can you do that?
Before you can manage processes, you must be able to identify them. Which tools will you use? ***
Running the command as root user. It is a good or bad practices?
How to check memory stats and CPU stats?
What is load average?
Where is my password stored on Linux/Unix?
How to recursively change permissions for all directories except files and for all files except directories?
Every command fails with command not found. How to trace the source of the error and resolve it?
You typing CTRL + C but your script still running. How do you stop it? ***
What is grep command? How to match multiple strings in the same line?
Explain the file content commands along with the description.
SIGHUP, SIGINT, SIGKILL, and SIGTERM POSIX signals. Explain.
What does kill command do?
What is the difference between rm and rm -rf?
How do I grep recursively? Explain on several examples. ***
archive.tgz has ~30 GB. How do you list content of it and extract only one file?
Execute combine multiple shell commands in one line.
What symbolic representation can you pass to chmod to give all users execute access to a file without affecting other permissions?
How can I sync two local directories?
Many basic maintenance tasks require you to edit config files. Explain ways to undo the changes you make.
You have to find all files larger than 20MB. How you do it?
Why do we use sudo su - and not just sudo su?
How to find files that have been modified on your system in the past 60 minutes?
What are the main reasons for keeping old log files?
What is an incremental backup?
What is RAID? What is RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID6, RAID10?
How is a user’s default group determined? How would you change it?
What is your best command line text editor for daily working and scripting? ***
Why would you want to mount servers in a rack?
Network Questions (23)
Draw me a simple network diagram: you have 20 systems, 1 router, 4 switches, 5 servers, and a small IP block. ***
What are the most important things to understand about the OSI (or any other) model?
What is the difference between a VLAN and a subnet? Do you need a VLAN to setup a subnet?
List 5 common network ports you should know.
What POP and IMAP are, and how to choose which of them you should implement?
How to check default route and routing table?
What is the difference between 127.0.0.1 and localhost?
Which port is used for ping command?
Server A can't talk to Server B. Describe possible reasons in a few steps.
Why won’t the hostnames resolve on your server? Fix this issue. ***
How to resolve the domain name (using external dns) with CLI? Can IPs be resolved to domain names?
How to test port connectivity with telnet or nc?
Why should you avoid telnet to administer a system remotely?
What is the difference between wget and curl?
What is SSH and how does it work?
Most tutorials suggest using SSH key authentication rather than password authentication. Why it is considered more secure?
What is a packet filter and how does it work?
What are the advantages of using a reverse proxy server?
What is the difference between a router and a gateway? What is the default gateway?
Explain the function of each of the following DNS records: SOA, PTR, A, MX, and CNAME.
Why couldn't MAC addresses be used instead of IPv4/6 for networking?
What is the smallest IPv4 subnet mask that can be applied to a network containing up to 30 devices?
What are some common HTTP status codes?
- 1xx - Informational responses - communicates transfer protocol-level information
- 2xx - Success - indicates that the client’s request was accepted successfully
- 3xx - Redirection - indicates that the client must take some additional action in order to complete their request
- 4xx - Client side error - this category of error status codes points the finger at clients
- 5xx - Server side error - the server takes responsibility for these error status codes
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