The position is for an Operations based Mid level Unix Admin. My expectations are that you understand how the operating system works and that you are somewhat knowledgeable about tools used to manage Unix systems.
We have a series of easy to hard technical questions we use to see just what a candidate knows. These are things that have come up in our (the team) experience as Unix Admins. Sure, it may not have come up for you which is why we don't ask one question, we ask a subset of the 50 or so questions and will delve deeper depending on the answer.
As I stated in another thread, we'll also let you dig your hole just as deep as you wish.
One of the things we do is list common daemons and request the candidate fill in the blanks with the well known port numbers.
It seems most recent candidates don't know that port 80 is http and that port 443 is https. Even better, yesterday's candidate (who had 13 years working at Sun and IBM and pointed out his experience as an e-mail admin) thought telnet was port 80 and didn't know the port for smtp (that's the mail program; port 25). Now if you're an e-mail admin, I really expect you to know what port is used for email. Heck, I expect you to be able to craft an on-the-fly e-mail message for testing, be able to read headers, and understand why an e-mail message that begins with "From" might actually begin with ">From" and how to end an e-mail message.
If you have 18 years experience as a Linux Admin, I expect you to be able to accurately tell me why file permissions are 664 and what permissions are needed to ensure access to a directory (he also said https' port was 81).
I expect a Unix Admin to know where the crontabs file is located on their Unix system of choice. To know where log files are located. What the -n switch means when you run netstat -rn to see the routing table. He knew how to get the routing table but when I asked why he used -rn, he didn't know.
I expect you to know about the tools used to view system performance stats. 'sar', 'vmstat', 'psrstat', 'iostat', etc. Telling me you use a custom script called 'top' and that you think this 'script' uses system tools really doesn't prove you know much of anything about the system (top isn't a script, it's a tool used to show the running processes, cpu load, io stats, memory and swap information).
And one of my favorite questions. Learn the difference between a hard link and a soft link. Telling me a hard link creates a copy of the file and maintains them by doing a sync behind the scenes is a serious eyebrow raiser. Better yet, telling me soft links are dangerous will get you in the hall of fame.
I expect to experience even more head shaking in the coming weeks as we interview folks.
Where are all the technical folks?
Carl
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Originally Posted by Ricky
