[mdlug] Job Interview Questions: Linux Admin

[Gib]

This is great. I see some ideas here that I didn't know about.

On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 10:35 PM Derek DeJonghe <mittendevelopment at gmail.com>
wrote:

> >Swap space? I thought 1998 was over. This had to be a trick question.
> lulz
>
> dstat is a useful / simple utility for figuring out where to direct your
> efforts in performance debugging,
> Poorly formatted output example:
> --total-cpu-usage-- -dsk/total- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system--
> usr sys idl wai stl| read  writ| recv  send|  in   out | int   csw
>  13   4  83   0   0|  32k 1784k| 420k  133k|   0     0 |  18k   51k
>
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 10:26 PM Michael Corral <micorral at comcast.net>
> wrote:
>
> > Le 2022-11-29, Monsieur Gib a ecrit:
> > > I had an interview for a Linux Admin job today. The technical questions
> > had
> > > to do with diagnosis of problems:
> > >
> > > What would you do to diagnose a slow system?
> >
> > After checking top (or htop) for memory/cpu hogs, I'd use systemctl to
> see
> > what services are running and which ones are not needed. Some indexing
> > services can really slow down a system. Also check disk space---it's
> > amazing how often slowness is due to a full or near full filesystem.
> > Lastly, check the fstab for mount options that could be slowing things
> > down.
> >
> > > How would you do a performance problem when more swap space needs to be
> > > added?
> >
> > Swap space? I thought 1998 was over. This had to be a trick question.
> >
> > > How would you handle a root password loss?
> >
> > In the old days you could boot into single-user mode without needing the
> > root password, but I think most distros have made it not so simple now.
> > Typically you have to boot into some special rescue mode and do a chroot,
> > then you can run passwd to reset root's password. If SELinux is enabled
> > then you'll have an additional step or two.
> >
> > Michael
> > _______________________________________________
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> > mdlug at mdlug.org
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> >
>
>
> --
> Derek DeJonghe
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