[mdlug] Job Interview Questions: Linux Admin

[Derek DeJonghe]

>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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-- 
Derek DeJonghe