"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?
A collection of sysadmin test questions and answers for interviews/exams
21–30 of 38 posts
Re: A collection of sysadmin test questions and answers for interviews/exams
#22"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 infinit…
there's at least one collaboratively edited doc about this standard interview Q; see https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when
Re: A collection of sysadmin test questions and answers for interviews/exams
#23"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 infinit…
Type in what? A text editor? Bash? A browser? An app?
I could see myself getting started on a big tangent, and the Interviewer listening politely, then responding with "you're over thinking it; a new line is inserted and the cursor moves to the next line."
Re: A collection of sysadmin test questions and answers for interviews/exams
#24"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 infinit…
there's at least one collaboratively edited doc about this standard interview Q; see https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when
Awesome, thanks for posting this
Re: A collection of sysadmin test questions and answers for interviews/exams
#25"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 infinit…
>"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.
wouldn't it check for aliases and functions first?
Re: A collection of sysadmin test questions and answers for interviews/exams
#26"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 infinit…
Type in what? A text editor? Bash? A browser? An app? I could see myself getting started on a big tangent, and the Interviewer listening politely, then responding with "you're over thinking it; a new line is inserted and the cursor moves to the next line."
Come on, the question is clearly about a browser
Re: A collection of sysadmin test questions and answers for interviews/exams
#27For 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.
Re: A collection of sysadmin test questions and answers for interviews/exams
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Type in what? A text editor? Bash? A browser? An app? I could see myself getting started on a big tangent, and the Interviewer listening politely, then responding with "you're over thinking it; a new line is inserted and the cursor moves to the next line."
Come on, the question is clearly about a browser
I don't see anything clear about it being a browser. If you want to ask silly questions like this, expect silly responses. There is a zillion ways to answer this question, I imagine the idea here is just to see a persons thought process, and not being 100% accurate.
Re: A collection of sysadmin test questions and answers for interviews/exams
#29Funny, 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.
Re: A collection of sysadmin test questions and answers for interviews/exams
#30"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 infinit…
Type in what? A text editor? Bash? A browser? An app? I could see myself getting started on a big tangent, and the Interviewer listening politely, then responding with "you're over thinking it; a new line is inserted and the cursor moves to the next line."
I think I would appreciate the tangent and see where it went, time allowing, as it still offers insight into your thought processes and depth of knowledge. If the tangent goes to far afield, you can always guide it back with additional leading questions...