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A collection of sysadmin test questions and answers for interviews/exams
- JulienSchmidt 8y agoThe title should start with "Show HN:", followed by something more readable than the repo path. E.g. "Show HN: Test your sysadmin skills"
- dpcx 8y agoI haven't seen mention of the fork bomb in a long time. I'm impressed that it was included here; gives me hope for the next batch of sysadmins.
- kazen44 8y agowhy would this "give you hope for the next batch of sysadmins"? Most sysadmins/SRE's i have met (especially on *nix), are very capable in their craft.
- dockthis 8y agoI don't agree with there being "a next batch of sysadmins" because the layers are so abstracted now. I have still seen systems that don't protect against fork bombs. I love taking advantage of it.
- Tharkun 8y agoI was hoping to get a printable version using gitprint, but it seems to create a corrupt PDF :-( https://gitprint.com/trimstray/test-your-sysadmin-skills/blob/master/README.md https://gitprint.com/trimstray/test-your-sysadmin-skills/blo...
- bigiain 8y agoThere are apparently only seven Linux distributions. Sorry ARCH people, you're not one of them. (I'd think twice about admitting to knowing of Kali at most interviews too, I guess...) (Note, they do admit: "The answers are only examples and do not exhaust the whole topic.")
- dockthis 8y agothis is some of the most poorly written english i've seen.. and, more importantly, the questions are not 100% Seems like a 3rd world sysadmin created this.
- ohthehugemanate 8y ago"what happens when you type api.example.com and press enter?" This has been one of my interview questions for years. Take a minute to speak your answer aloud. Do it now, I'll wait. It requires walking through several layers and subsystems. Really a great question for exposing how the candidate models a complex system. The best part, as an interviewer, is seeing how deep the candidate goes down the potentially infinite rabbit hole. The most entertaining answer I've received started with the electrical contact in your ENTER key sending the key code through USB. He briefly digressed into the pinout of PS/2 vs USB, and continued in that fashion.
- PopeDotNinja 8y agoA former boss of mine was like that. It's fascinating to hear him speak.
- amrx431 8y agoHoly shit. The most detail I know is the calculation of IPaddr from physical address.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago>"what happens when you type api.example.com and press enter?" That's easy. Bash checks all the directories as listed in my $PATH, doesn't find it and then prints "api.example.com: command not found" on the screen. If you want me to tell you how a bluetooth keyboard works you're going to need to pay more than a sysadmin's salary.
- Cmerlyn 8y agowouldn't it check for aliases and functions first?
- hsk0823 8y agoPlease don't take offense, but there are plenty of people in the world, who know the intricacies of Bluetooth, know the intricacies of how a keyboard send signals, may even know the pin out of PS/2 and USB, yet make no where near what people holding the title "Site Reliability Engineer" or "DevOps Engineer" do. There are some poorly paid electrical engineers in the world. There are overpaid under educated sysadmins in the world as well.
- BobBagwill 8y agoNice try, but ... Many of the questions in the Regular and Senior categories I would put into Junior. It's not clear to me who the audience is for this. It's not comprehensive enough for a test-giver, test-taker or self-studier. Having it be a single MarkDown document makes it hard to munge. I would guess that there is a better vefsion already written elsewhere.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nreese2018 8y agoI really want to contribute to this, but it seems like it is so incomplete and full of Opinion instead of fact that doing so would be more like me doing your homework for you, instead of showing you how to do it yourself.
- AnnoyingSwede 8y ago"What do you understand by CLI?".. Something about this question makes me question what they are expecting you to answer. Last sentance: "CLI is very easy to use, but it should be typed very precisely.".. First of CLI includes sh,ash,bash,ksh and all other command lines, all with a variaty of difficulty and their own querks. "CLI is very easy" depends on how well you know it, master it and obfuscate an operation in it. I am not sure what that question, or whatever answer you get out of it, would help you determain what a person actually know beside knowing the abriviation?
- mancerayder 8y agoFor some reason, sorting algorithms and whiteboarding snuck their way in a few years ago. Here's hoping that fad came and went for 95% of roles which don't require extreme scaling.
- peterwwillis 8y agoFunny, I don't see the immutable file question, or questions on capabilities, systemd, selinux, etc. Also, there are "big traffic" questions missing, like how to tune a kernel to perform lots of network ops, how to design a system for high-performance and high-availability, network attached storage, firewalls, replication, etc. Basically, how do I build a system that I know can deliver X traffic at Y rate, and scale it? Then there are the process questions, which always seem missing. How do you prioritize work? How do you balance projects and toil? How do you manage working on the same set of services with multiple team members on multiple platforms? How do you handle incidents? What is your typical postmortem like? What do you do when a customer asks you to do something? When a manager does? How do you manage your automated tasks? Give me an example of implementing auto-healing. Give me two examples of how you have migrated or upgraded a running service. Multiple customers have reported that the production site is down; what do you do? Then there's more modern stuff which should be standard by now, like talking about using Docker, job schedulers, CI/CD, monitoring, configuration management, inventory management, secret management, deployment, HP/HA, distributed computing, etc. Even using the cloud should be standard now, as virtually every company that isn't using it wants to.
- hsk0823 8y agoIsn't that the magic of GitHub? Put in a PR
- expertentipp 8y agoI'll never get any job again:/
- PakG1 8y agoHey, it lists answers too. And it's concise. That makes it immediately useful. I was expecting a list of questions, and the interviewer is expected to just muddle through picking the ones for which they knew the answer. Not only is it immediately useful, it's actually educational. That's nice. I'd say it's well done, even if some people are saying that the questions are too junior. It's well-organized, well-structured, and well-written.