test-your-sysadmin-skills

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"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)

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"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)

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ℹ️  This project contains 284 test questions and answers that can be used as a test your knowledge or during an interview/exam for position such as Linux (*nix) System Administrator.

✔️  The answers are only examples and do not exhaust the whole topic. Most of them contains useful resources for a deeper understanding.

⚠️  Questions marked *** don't have answer yet or answer is incomplete - make a pull request to add them!

🚥  If you find something which doesn't make sense, or something doesn't seem right, please make a pull request and please add valid and well-reasoned explanations about your changes or comments.

📚  In order to improve your knowledge/skills please see devops-interview-questions. It looks really interesting.

» All suggestions are welcome «

Table of Contents

The type of chapter	Number of questions	Short description
Introduction
🔸 Simple Questions	14 questions	Relaxed, fun and simple - are great for starting everything.
General Knowledge
🔸 Junior Sysadmin	65 questions	Reasonably simple and straight based on basic knowledge.
🔸 Regular Sysadmin	94 questions	The mid level of questions if that you have sound knowledge.
🔸 Senior Sysadmin	99 questions	Hard questions and riddles. Check it if you want to be good.
Secret Knowledge
🔸 Guru Sysadmin	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?

- Red Hat Enterprise Linux - Fedora - CentOS - Debian - Ubuntu - Mint - SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) - SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) - Slackware - Arch - Kali - Backbox

My favorite Linux distribution:

• Arch Linux, which offers a nice minimalist base system on which one can build a custom operating system. The beauty of it too is that it has the Arch User Repository (AUR), which when combined with its official binary repositories allows it to probably have the largest repositories of any distribution. Its packaging process is also very simple, which means if one wants a package not in its official repositories or the AUR, it should be easy to make it for oneself.
• Linux Mint, which is also built from Ubuntu LTS releases, but features editions featuring a few different desktop environments, including Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. Mint is quite polished and its aesthetics are rather appealing, I especially like its new icon theme, although I do quite dislike its GTK+ theme (too bland to my taste). I’ve also found a bug in its latest release Mint 19, that is getting quite irritating as I asked for with it over a fortnight ago on their forums and I have received no replies so far and it is a bug that makes my life on it more difficult.
• Kali Linux, is a Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at advanced Penetration Testing and Security Auditing. Kali contains several hundred tools which are geared towards various information security tasks, such as Penetration Testing, Security research, Computer Forensics and Reverse Engineering.

Useful resources:

• List of Linux distributions
• What is your favorite Linux distro and why?

What are the differences between Unix, Linux, BSD, and GNU?

GNU isn't really an OS. It's more of a set of rules or philosophies that govern free software, that at the same time gave birth to a bunch of tools while trying to create an OS. So GNU tools are basically open versions of tools that already existed, but were reimplemented to conform to principals of open software. GNU/Linux is a mesh of those tools and the Linux kernel to form a complete OS, but there are other GNUs, e.g. GNU/Hurd.

Unix and BSD are "older" implementations of POSIX that are various levels of "closed source". Unix is usually totally closed source, but there are as many flavors of Unix as there are Linux (if not more). BSD is not usually considered "open", but it was considered to be very open when it was released. Its licensing also allowed for commercial use with far fewer restrictions than the more "open" licenses of the time allowed.