Linux System Administrator/DevOps Interview Questions

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.
  • Tell me about the biggest mistake you've made in [some recent time period] and how you would do it differently today. What did you learn from this experience?
  • Why must we choose you?
  • What function does DNS play on a network?
  • What is HTTP?
  • What is an HTTP proxy and how does it work?
  • Describe briefly how HTTPS works.
  • What is SMTP? Give the basic scenario of how a mail message is delivered via SMTP.
  • What is RAID? What is RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID10?
  • What is a level 0 backup? What is an incremental backup?
  • Describe the general file system hierarchy of a Linux system.
  • Which difference have between public and private SSH key?

Simple Linux Questions:

  • What is the name and the UID of the administrator user?
  • How to list all files, including hidden ones, in a directory?
  • What is the Unix/Linux command to remove a directory and its contents?
  • Which command will show you free/used memory? Does free memory exist on Linux?
  • How to search for the string "my konfu is the best" in files of a directory recursively?
  • How to connect to a remote server or what is SSH?
  • How to get all environment variables and how can you use them?
  • I get "command not found" when I run ifconfig -a. What can be wrong?
  • What happens if I type TAB-TAB?
  • What command will show the available disk space on the Unix/Linux system?
  • What commands do you know that can be used to check DNS records?
  • What Unix/Linux commands will alter a files ownership, files permissions?
  • What does chmod +x FILENAME do?
  • What does the permission 0750 on a file mean?
  • What does the permission 0750 on a directory mean?
  • How to add a new system user without login permissions?
  • How to add/remove a group from a user?
  • What is a bash alias?
  • How do you set the mail address of the root/a user?
  • What does CTRL-c do?
  • What does CTRL-d do?
  • What does CTRL-z do?
  • What is in /etc/services?
  • How to redirect STDOUT and STDERR in bash? (> /dev/null 2>&1)
  • What is the difference between UNIX and Linux.
  • What is the difference between Telnet and SSH?
  • Explain the three load averages and what do they indicate. What command can be used to view the load averages?
  • Can you name a lower-case letter that is not a valid option for GNU ls?
  • What is a Linux kernel module?
  • Walk me through the steps in booting into single user mode to troubleshoot a problem.
  • Walk me through the steps you'd take to troubleshoot a 404 error on a web application you administer.
  • What is ICMP protocol? Why do you need to use?

Medium Linux Questions:

  • What do the following commands do and how would you use them?
  • tee
  • awk
  • tr
  • cut
  • tac
  • curl
  • wget
  • watch
  • head
  • tail
  • less
  • cat
  • touch
  • sar
  • netstat
  • tcpdump
  • lsof
  • What does an & after a command do?
  • What does & disown after a command do?
  • What is a packet filter and how does it work?
  • What is Virtual Memory?
  • What is swap and what is it used for?
  • What is an A record, an NS record, a PTR record, a CNAME record, an MX record?
  • Are there any other RRs and what are they used for?
  • What is a Split-Horizon DNS?
  • What is the sticky bit?
  • What does the immutable bit do to a file?
  • What is the difference between hardlinks and symlinks? What happens when you remove the source to a symlink/hardlink?
  • What is an inode and what fields are stored in an inode?
  • How to force/trigger a file system check on next reboot?
  • What is SNMP and what is it used for?
  • What is a runlevel and how to get the current runlevel?
  • What is SSH port forwarding?
  • What is the difference between local and remote port forwarding?
  • What are the steps to add a user to a system without using useradd/adduser?
  • What is MAJOR and MINOR numbers of special files?
  • Describe the mknod command and when you'd use it.
  • Describe a scenario when you get a "filesystem is full" error, but 'df' shows there is free space.
  • Describe a scenario when deleting a file, but 'df' not showing the space being freed.
  • Describe how 'ps' works.
  • What happens to a child process that dies and has no parent process to wait for it and what’s bad about this?
  • Explain briefly each one of the process states.
  • How to know which process listens on a specific port?
  • What is a zombie process and what could be the cause of it?
  • You run a bash script and you want to see its output on your terminal and save it to a file at the same time. How could you do it?
  • Explain what echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward does.
  • Describe briefly the steps you need to take in order to create and install a valid certificate for the site https://foo.example.com.
  • Can you have several HTTPS virtual hosts sharing the same IP?
  • What is a wildcard certificate?
  • Which Linux file types do you know?
  • What is the difference between a process and a thread? And parent and child processes after a fork system call?
  • What is the difference between exec and fork?
  • What is "nohup" used for?
  • What is the difference between these two commands?
  • myvar=hello
  • export myvar=hello
  • How many NTP servers would you configure in your local ntp.conf?
  • What does the column 'reach' mean in ntpq -p output?
  • You need to upgrade kernel at 100-1000 servers, how you would do this?
  • How can you get Host, Channel, ID, LUN of SCSI disk?
  • How can you limit process memory usage?
  • What is bash quick substitution/caret replace(^x^y)?
  • Do you know of any alternative shells? If so, have you used any?
  • What is a tarpipe (or, how would you go about copying everything, including hardlinks and special files, from one server to another)?
  • How can you tell if the httpd package was already installed?
  • How can you list the contents of a package?
  • How can you determine which package is better: openssh-server-5.3p1-118.1.el6_8.x86_64 or openssh-server-6.6p1-1.el6.x86_64 ?
  • Can you explain to me the difference between block based, and object based storage?

Hard Linux Questions:

  • What is a tunnel and how you can bypass a http proxy?
  • What is the difference between IDS and IPS?
  • What shortcuts do you use on a regular basis?
  • What is the Linux Standard Base?
  • What is an atomic operation?
  • Your freshly configured http server is not running after a restart, what can you do?
  • What kind of keys are in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys and what it is this file used for?
  • I've added my public ssh key into authorized_keys but I'm still getting a password prompt, what can be wrong?
  • Did you ever create RPM's, DEB's or solaris pkg's?
  • What does :(){ :|:& };: do on your system?
  • How do you catch a Linux signal on a script?
  • Can you catch a SIGKILL?
  • What's happening when the Linux kernel is starting the OOM killer and how does it choose which process to kill first?
  • Describe the linux boot process with as much detail as possible, starting from when the system is powered on and ending when you get a prompt.
  • What's a chroot jail?
  • When trying to umount a directory it says it's busy, how to find out which PID holds the directory?
  • What's LD_PRELOAD and when it's used?
  • You ran a binary and nothing happened. How would you debug this?
  • What are cgroups? Can you specify a scenario where you could use them?
  • How can you remove/delete a file with file-name consisting of only non-printable/non-type-able characters?
  • How can you increase or decrease the priority of a process in Linux?

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?
  • What is Huge Tables? Why isn't it enabled by default? Why and when use it?
  • What is LUKS? How to use 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 is the command used to show all open ports and/or socket connections on a machine?
  • Is 300.168.0.123 a valid IPv4 address?
  • Which IP ranges/subnets are "private" or "non-routable" (RFC 1918)?
  • What is a VLAN?
  • What is ARP and what is it used for?
  • What is the difference between TCP and UDP?
  • What is the purpose of a default gateway?
  • What is command used to show the routing table on a Linux box?
  • A TCP connection on a network can be uniquely defined by 4 things. What are those things?
  • When a client running a web browser connects to a web server, what is the source port and what is the destination port of the connection?
  • How do you add an IPv6 address to a specific interface?
  • You have added an IPv4 and IPv6 address to interface eth0. A ping to the v4 address is working but a ping to the v6 address gives you the response sendmsg: operation not permitted. What could be wrong?
  • What is SNAT and when should it be used?
  • Explain how could you ssh login into a Linux system that DROPs all new incoming packets using a SSH tunnel.
  • How do you stop a DDoS attack?
  • How can you see content of an ip packet?
  • What is IPoAC (RFC 1149)?
  • What will happen when you bind port 0?

[] 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?
  • Explain briefly the differences between InnoDB and MyISAM.
  • Describe briefly the steps you need to follow in order to create a simple master/slave cluster.
  • Why should you run "mysql_secure_installation" after installing MySQL?
  • How do you check which jobs are running?
  • How would you take a backup of a MySQL database?

DevOps Questions:

  • Can you describe your workflow when you create a script?
  • What is GIT?
  • What is a dynamically/statically linked file?
  • What does "./configure && make && make install" do?
  • What is puppet/chef/ansible used for?
  • What is Nagios/Zenoss/NewRelic used for?
  • What is Jenkins/TeamCity/GoCI used for?
  • What is the difference between Containers and VMs?
  • How do you create a new postgres user?
  • What is a virtual IP address? What is a cluster?
  • How do you print all strings of printable characters present in a file?
  • How do you find shared library dependencies?
  • What is Automake and Autoconf?
  • ./configure shows an error that libfoobar is missing on your system, how could you fix this, what could be wrong?
  • What are the advantages/disadvantages of script vs compiled program?
  • What's the relationship between continuous delivery and DevOps?
  • What are the important aspects of a system of continuous integration and deployment?
  • How would you enable network file sharing within AWS that would allow EC2 instances in multiple availability zones to share data?

Fun Questions:

  • A careless sysadmin executes the following command: chmod 444 /bin/chmod - what do you do to fix this?
  • I've lost my root password, what can I do?
  • I've rebooted a remote server but after 10 minutes I'm still not able to ssh into it, what can be wrong?
  • If you were stuck on a desert island with only 5 command-line utilities, which would you choose?
  • You come across a random computer and it appears to be a command console for the universe. What is the first thing you type?
  • Tell me about a creative way that you've used SSH?
  • You have deleted by error a running script, what could you do to restore it?
  • What will happen on 19 January 2038?
  • How to reboot server when reboot command is not responding?

Demo Time:

  • Unpack test.tar.gz without man pages or google.
  • Remove all "*.pyc" files from testdir recursively?
  • Search for "my konfu is the best" in all *.py files.
  • Replace the occurrence of "my konfu is the best" with "I'm a linux jedi master" in all *.txt files.
  • Test if port 443 on a machine with IP address X.X.X.X is reachable.
  • Get http://myinternal.webserver.local/test.html via telnet.
  • How to send an email without a mail client, just on the command line?
  • Write a get_prim method in python/perl/bash/pseudo.
  • Find all files which have been accessed within the last 30 days.
  • Explain the following command (date ; ps -ef | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq | wc -l ) >> Activity.log
  • Write a script to list all the differences between two directories.
  • In a log file with contents as <TIME> : [MESSAGE] : [ERROR_NO] - Human readable text display summary/count of specific error numbers that occurred every hour or a specific hour.
أحدث أقدم