Monday, 21 November 2011

Windows admin interview questions

Windows admin interview questions (includes Vista)

  1. What is Active Directory?
  2. What is LDAP?
  3. Can you connect Active Directory to other 3rd-party Directory Services? Name a few options.
  4. Where is the AD database held? What other folders are related to AD?
  5. What is the SYSVOL folder?
  6. Name the AD NCs and replication issues for each NC
  7. What are application partitions? When do I use them
  8. How do you create a new application partition
  9. How do you view replication properties for AD partitions and DCs?
  10. What is the Global Catalog?
  11. How do you view all the GCs in the forest?
  12. Why not make all DCs in a large forest as GCs?
  13. Trying to look at the Schema, how can I do that?
  14. What are the Support Tools? Why do I need them?
  15. What is LDP? What is REPLMON? What is ADSIEDIT? What is NETDOM? What is REPADMIN?
  16. What are sites? What are they used for?
  17. What’s the difference between a site link’s schedule and interval?
  18. What is the KCC?
  19. What is the ISTG? Who has that role by default?
  20. What are the requirements for installing AD on a new server?
  21. What can you do to promote a server to DC if you’re in a remote location with slow WAN link?
  22. How can you forcibly remove AD from a server, and what do you do later? • Can I get user passwords from the AD database?
  23. What tool would I use to try to grab security related packets from the wire?
  24. Name some OU design considerations.
  25. What is tombstone lifetime attribute?
  26. What do you do to install a new Windows 2003 DC in a Windows 2000 AD?
  27. What do you do to install a new Windows 2003 R2 DC in a Windows 2003 AD?
  28. How would you find all users that have not logged on since last month?
  29. What are the DS* commands?
  30. What’s the difference between LDIFDE and CSVDE? Usage considerations?
  31. What are the FSMO roles? Who has them by default? What happens when each one fails?
  32. What FSMO placement considerations do you know of?
  33. I want to look at the RID allocation table for a DC. What do I do?
  34. What’s the difference between transferring a FSMO role and seizing one? Which one should you NOT seize? Why?
  35. How do you configure a “stand-by operation master” for any of the roles?
  36. How do you backup AD?
  37. How do you restore AD?
  38. How do you change the DS Restore admin password?
  39. Why can’t you restore a DC that was backed up 4 months ago?
  40. What are GPOs?
  41. What is the order in which GPOs are applied?
  42. Name a few benefits of using GPMC.
  43. What are the GPC and the GPT? Where can I find them?
  44. What are GPO links? What special things can I do to them?
  45. What can I do to prevent inheritance from above?
  46. How can I override blocking of inheritance?
  47. How can you determine what GPO was and was not applied for a user? Name a few ways to do that.
  48. A user claims he did not receive a GPO, yet his user and computer accounts are in the right OU, and everyone else there gets the GPO. What will you look for?
  49. Name a few differences in Vista GPOs
  50. Name some GPO settings in the computer and user parts.
  51. What are administrative templates?
  52. What’s the difference between software publishing and assigning?
  53. Can I deploy non-MSI software with GPO?
  54. You want to standardize the desktop environments (wallpaper, My Documents, Start menu, printers etc.) on the computers in one department. How would you do that?

Hiring an IT guy - questions to ask

 This is an aggregated list of questions discussed for hiring an IT guy for your organization Check out their discussion, and description of what question are good and which ones are not that good.
  1. What port does telnet use?
  2. What is SMTP?
  3. How would you troubleshoot a printer?
  4. How does traceroute work?
  5. Walk me through everything that happens in the network from the  moment you punch in www.google.com in the address bar to when the browser displays the page?
  6. Can you work this weekend?
  7. What kind of people are your current users? Do you like them?
  8. What role do you think computer support analysts should play in the company?
  9. Assuming you have to work for a living and all jobs pay the same, how would you describe the job you want?
  10. When conflict arises on your team, how do you handle it?
  11. How do you stay current?
  12. What operating system do you prefer and why?
  13. What part of the project life cycle have you worked on?
  14. Describe the project or situation that best demonstrates your coding (or analytical) skills.
  15. What is the differece between local, global and universal groups?
  16. What is the major difference between FAT and NTFS?
  17. Name the FMSO roles and their functions.
  18. You’ve just been asked to create 20 new Users and update 2 GPOs, ASAP! You go to the Administrative Tools, and discover they are all gone. What do you do? What do you suspect happened?
  19. What is a Global Catalog?
  20. Explain the function of DNS.
  21. Explain a “Two-Way Transitive” trust.
  22. In speaking about trusts, what does “Non-transitive” mean?
  23. Describe the lease process of DHCP.
  24. Explain NTP.
  25. What is the 568B wiring scheme?
  26. What us your highest achievement while working in the IT field?
  27. What are your short term goals to achieve?
  28. You have a user call for support for the 5th time on the same issue. How would you handle the call and what would you do differently?
  29. List as many ways you can think of to move a file from a Windows machine to a Linux machine.
  30. Demonstrate recursiveness by implementing a factorial function.

Linux command line Q&A


  • You need to see the last fifteen lines of the files dog, cat and horse. What command should you use?  tail -15 dog cat horse 
    The tail utility displays the end of a file. The -15 tells tail to display the last fifteen lines of each specified file 



  • Who owns the data dictionary? 
    The SYS user owns the data dictionary. The SYS and SYSTEM users are created when the database is created.
  • You routinely compress old log files. You now need to examine a log from two months ago. In order to view its contents without first having to decompress it, use the _________ utility. 
    zcat 
    The zcat utility allows you to examine the contents of a compressed file much the same way that cat displays a file.
  • You suspect that you have two commands with the same name as the command is not producing the expected results. What command can you use to determine the location of the command being run? 
    which 
    The which command searches your path until it finds a command that matches the command you are looking for and displays its full path.
  • You locate a command in the /bin directory but do not know what it does. What command can you use to determine its purpose. 
    whatis 
    The whatis command displays a summary line from the man page for the specified command.
  • You wish to create a link to the /data directory in bob’s home directory so you issue the command ln /data /home/bob/datalink but the command fails. What option should you use in this command line to be successful. 
    Use the -F option 
    In order to create a link to a directory you must use the -F option.
  • When you issue the command ls -l, the first character of the resulting display represents the file’s ___________. 
    type 
    The first character of the permission block designates the type of file that is being displayed.
  • What utility can you use to show a dynamic listing of running processes? __________ 
    top 
    The top utility shows a listing of all running processes that is dynamically updated.
  • Where is standard output usually directed? 
    to the screen or display 
    By default, your shell directs standard output to your screen or display.
  • You wish to restore the file memo.ben which was backed up in the tarfile MyBackup.tar. What command should you type? 
    tar xf MyBackup.tar memo.ben 
    This command uses the x switch to extract a file. Here the file memo.ben will be restored from the tarfile MyBackup.tar.
  • You need to view the contents of the tarfile called MyBackup.tar. What command would you use? 
    tar tf MyBackup.tar 
    The t switch tells tar to display the contents and the f modifier specifies which file to examine.
  • You want to create a compressed backup of the users’ home directories. What utility should you use? 
    tar 
    You can use the z modifier with tar to compress your archive at the same time as creating it.
  • What daemon is responsible for tracking events on your system? 
    syslogd 
    The syslogd daemon is responsible for tracking system information and saving it to specified log files.
  • You have a file called phonenos that is almost 4,000 lines long. What text filter can you use to split it into four pieces each 1,000 lines long? 
    split 
    The split text filter will divide files into equally sized pieces. The default length of each piece is 1,000 lines.
  • You would like to temporarily change your command line editor to be vi. What command should you type to change it? 
    set -o vi 
    The set command is used to assign environment variables. In this case, you are instructing your shell to assign vi as your command line editor. However, once you log off and log back in you will return to the previously defined command line editor.
  • What account is created when you install Linux? 
    root 
    Whenever you install Linux, only one user account is created. This is the superuser account also known as root.
  • What command should you use to check the number of files and disk space used and each user’s defined quotas? 
    repquota 
    The repquota command is used to get a report on the status of the quotas you have set including the amount of allocated space and amount of used space.
  • Linux Unix Networking Interview Questions



    What is LILO?
    LILO stands for Linux boot loader. It will load the MBR, master boot record, into the memory, and tell the system which partition and hard drive to boot from.
    What is the main advantage of creating links to a file instead of copies of the file?
    A: The main advantage is not really that it saves disk space (though it does that too) but, rather, that a change of permissions on the file is applied to all the link access points. The link will show permissions of lrwxrwxrwx but that is for the link itself and not the access to the file to which the link points. Thus if you want to change the permissions for a command, such as su, you only have to do it on the original. With copies you have to find all of the copies and change permission on each of the copies.
    Write a command to find all of the files which have been accessed within the last 30 days.
    find / -type f -atime -30 > December.files
    This command will find all the files under root, which is ‘/’, with file type is file. ‘-atime -30′ will give all the files accessed less than 30 days ago. And the output will put into a file call December.files.
    What is the most graceful way to get to run level single user mode?
    A: The most graceful way is to use the command init s.
    If you want to shut everything down before going to single user mode then do init 0 first and from the ok prompt do a boot -s.
    What does the following command line produce? Explain each aspect of this line.
    $ (date ; ps -ef | awk ‘{print $1}’ | sort | uniq | wc -l ) >> Activity.log
    A: First let’s dissect the line: The date gives the date and time as the first command of the line, this is followed by the a list of all running processes in long form with UIDs listed first, this is the ps -ef. These are fed into the awk which filters out all but the UIDs; these UIDs are piped into sort for no discernible reason and then onto uniq (now we see the reason for the sort - uniq only works on sorted data - if the list is A, B, A, then A, B, A will be the output of uniq, but if it’s A, A, B then A, B is the output) which produces only one copy of each UID.
    These UIDs are fed into wc -l which counts the lines - in this case the number of distinct UIDs running processes on the system. Finally the results of these two commands, the date and the wc -l, are appended to the file "Activity.log". Now to answer the question as to what this command line produces. This writes the date and time into the file Activity.log together with the number of distinct users who have processes running on the system at that time. If the file already exists, then these items are appended to the file, otherwise the file is created.



    1. List the files in current directory sorted by size ? - ls -l | grep ^- | sort -nr
    2. List the hidden files in current directory ? - ls -a1 | grep "^\."
    3. Delete blank lines in a file ? - cat sample.txt | grep -v ‘^$’ > new_sample.txt
    4. Search for a sample string in particular files ? - grep .Debug. *.confHere grep uses the string .Debug. to search in all files with extension..conf. under current directory.
    5. Display the last newly appending lines of a file during appendingdata to the same file by some processes ? - tail .f Debug.logHere tail shows the newly appended data into Debug.log by some processes/user.
    6. Display the Disk Usage of file sizes under each directory in currentDirectory ? - du -k * | sort .nr (or) du .k . | sort -nr
    7. Change to a directory, which is having very long name ? - cd CDMA_3X_GEN*Here original directory name is . .CDMA_3X_GENERATION_DATA..
    8. Display the all files recursively with path under current directory ? - find . -depth -print
    9. Set the Display automatically for the current new user ? - export DISPLAY=`eval ‘who am i | cut -d"(" -f2 | cut -d")" -f1′`Here in above command, see single quote, double quote, grave ascent is used. Observe carefully.
    10. Display the processes, which are running under yourusername ? - ps .aef | grep MaheshvjHere, Maheshvj is the username.
    11. List some Hot Keys for bash shell ? - Ctrl+l . Clears the Screen. Ctrl+r . Does a search in previously given commands in shell. Ctrl+u - Clears the typing before the hotkey. Ctrl+a . Places cursor at the beginning of the command at shell. Ctrl+e . Places cursor at the end of the command at shell. Ctrl+d . Kills the shell. Ctrl+z . Places the currently running process into background.
    12.  Display the files in the directory by file size ? - ls .ltr | sort .nr .k 5
    13. How to save man pages to a file ? - man <command> | col .b > <output-file>Example : man top | col .b > top_help.txt
    14. How to know the date & time for . when script is executed ? - Add the following script line in shell script.eval echo "Script is executed at `date`" >> timeinfo.infHere, .timeinfo.inf. contains date & time details ie., when script is executed and history related to execution.
    15. How do you find out drive statistics ? - iostat -E
    16. Display disk usage in Kilobytes ? - du -k
    17. Display top ten largest files/directories ? - du -sk * | sort -nr | head
    18. How much space is used for users in kilobytes ? - quot -af
    19. How to create null file ? - cat /dev/null > filename1
    20. Access common commands quicker ? - ps -ef | grep -i $@
    21. Display the page size of memory ? - pagesize -a
    22. Display Ethernet Address arp table ? - arp -a
    23. Display the no.of active established connections to localhost ? - netstat -a | grep EST
    24. Display the state of interfaces used for TCP/IP traffice ? - netstat -i
    25. Display the parent/child tree of a process ? - ptree <pid> Example: ptree 1267
    26. Show the working directory of a process ? - pwdx <pid> Example: pwdx 1267
    27. Display the processes current open files ? - pfiles <pid> Example: pfiles 1267
    28. Display the inter-process communication facility status ? - ipcs
    29. Display the top most process utilizing most CPU ? - top .b 1
    30. Alternative for top command ? - prstat -a