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Sr Systems Administrator Interview Questions

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530 sr systems administrator interview questions shared by candidates

The questions were a mixture of technical and behavioural. They wanted me to have solid troubleshooting skills, as well as ideas on how to improve current systems. I provided concrete examples of what I have done at previous positions and answered technical hypotheticals. I also had discussions around what the IT goals were for the next few years and discussed how they could be accomplished.
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Senior Systems Administrator

Interviewed at Talentry (Germany)

4.9★
May 7, 2019

The questions were a mixture of technical and behavioural. They wanted me to have solid troubleshooting skills, as well as ideas on how to improve current systems. I provided concrete examples of what I have done at previous positions and answered technical hypotheticals. I also had discussions around what the IT goals were for the next few years and discussed how they could be accomplished.

How to know the version of the linux distribution you are running ? How do you know the current load on the system ? From the previous question, what do those 3 numbers represent ? What could explain the difference when you run du and df ? That server is an Centos apache webserver , how do you get the list of all virtual hosts it can serve ? That server is a Centos mysql5 server, how would you know if it’s a master, a slave or both ? That server is a Centos mysql5 server, how will you get a list of queries currently running on the host ? One liner : list all the volumes writable on that system Paste here the $PS1 that you usually have on the system you worked with Write a regular expression (or sed script) to replace all occurrences of the letter ‘w’, followed by any number of characters, followed by the letter ‘s’, followed by a space, followed by one or more numeric characters, and replace what’s found with the string “UNIX”. What is an MX record? What command do you run to check file system consistency? What is the difference between UDP and TCP? How would you check the route table on a workstation/server? What does nslookup do? Write a command to find all of the files in /var which have been accessed within the last 10 days. You type wget http://www.google.com/. What happens? What are links and symbolic links in UNIX file system? What command would change a file to allow the owner to read and exec, everyone else to only exec. What is the answer to the life, universe and everything?
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Senior Systems Administrator

Interviewed at Gorilla Nation

3.7★
Nov 6, 2012

How to know the version of the linux distribution you are running ? How do you know the current load on the system ? From the previous question, what do those 3 numbers represent ? What could explain the difference when you run du and df ? That server is an Centos apache webserver , how do you get the list of all virtual hosts it can serve ? That server is a Centos mysql5 server, how would you know if it’s a master, a slave or both ? That server is a Centos mysql5 server, how will you get a list of queries currently running on the host ? One liner : list all the volumes writable on that system Paste here the $PS1 that you usually have on the system you worked with Write a regular expression (or sed script) to replace all occurrences of the letter ‘w’, followed by any number of characters, followed by the letter ‘s’, followed by a space, followed by one or more numeric characters, and replace what’s found with the string “UNIX”. What is an MX record? What command do you run to check file system consistency? What is the difference between UDP and TCP? How would you check the route table on a workstation/server? What does nslookup do? Write a command to find all of the files in /var which have been accessed within the last 10 days. You type wget http://www.google.com/. What happens? What are links and symbolic links in UNIX file system? What command would change a file to allow the owner to read and exec, everyone else to only exec. What is the answer to the life, universe and everything?

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