Interview Questions: User Management

1. How to add a user to a group

2. How to lock/unlock a user

3. All fields of /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow

4. What is meaning of setting group password

5. How to check password status of a user

6. How to set passwod policy of a user

7. What is /etc/skel and login.defs file

8. What is the flow of user login

9. What will be the ownership of files owned by a deleted user

10. How to change users home direcroty, login shell, uid , gid etc.

11. How to set ACLs so that the directorys created in a ACL applied directory
get inherited ACLs set.

12. Explain /etc/default/useradd

13. How to assign a duplicate uid to a user ?

14. How to recover a corruted/damaged password file ?

15. pwconv and pwunconv command

16. how will you differentiate a primary and secondary group?

17. How to add more than one secondary group to user ?

18. finger command

19. How to force a user to change its password on first login attempt.

20. Can you edit /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/group files ?

21. What is configuration file for sudo and how to write in it ?

22. How to assign sudo access to a user ?

23. What is the meaning for three ALLs in assigning sudo access ?

24. How to assign the sudo access so that the self password is not asked while
running the command ?

25. What is User, Host and Command aliases in sudo?

26. How to give access to entire system group ?

27. How to neglect a specific user/host/command from the alias or group ?

28. which one take precedence login.defs or pam ?

29. How to authenticate your Linux system with openldap server ?

30. How to authenticate your linux system with AD server ?

31. Interview Questions: File Permissions

32. What is meaning for rwx permissions for a directory.

33. What are special permissions?

34. What are the permissions on /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/group

35. What are ACLs and how to apply them ?

36. How to set inherited ACLs ?

37. How to change the file permissions ?

38. What is umask value? How to see it, change it ?

39. How to set file attributes ?

40. Interview Questions: Linux

Network Configuration

41. What is the network configuration file ?

42. How to check the status of network interfaces ?

43. How to set the default gateway ?

44. How to create the reboot persistent routes ?

45. What is bonding and how to create it ?

46. How to check the status of bond0 ?

47. How to change the parameters of ethernets ?

48. How to monitor the network performance?

49. What are various bonding modes ?

50. What is virtual ip and how to set it ?

51. What are various IP address classes ?

52. How to find the installed NIC in a server?

53. What is a network socket ?

54. What is /etc/nsswitch.conf file ?

55. What is /etc/resolv.conf file ?

56. How to remove network card out of bond ?

57. On which port DNS and DHCP works ? Ans. 53 & 68

58. What is scan ports on a remote machine ?

59. What is tcpdump command ?

60. What is nslookup and traceroute command used for ?

61. How to find the Ethernet cards driver and firmware versions ?

62. Linux Interview Questions: FTP & Logs

63. How to create ftp users ?

64. On which port ftp works, configuration file, service name ?

65. How to enable or disable a ftp user ?

66. What is difference between sftp and vsftp ?

67. Where are system logs stored ?

68. Where are sudo and su logs stored ?

69. Where does mail server related logs stored ?

70. Where are the logs stored for system start up ?

71. What is dmesg command ?

72. What is the configuration file to configure log paths

73. Which service needs to be running to configure logging

74. How to set up remote logging ?

75. How log rotation works ?

76. How to monitor the log files ?

77. Interview Questions: Package Management

78. Difference between yum and rpm

79. Up2date command

80. What is satellite server

81. How to update kernel

82. Difference between rpm U and rpm F

83. How to check which packages provides the specific file or feature ?

84. How to use yum for packages residing locally on the machine

85. How to register your server with rhn/satellite

86. Explain the configuration file of yum repository?

87. How many repositories are available on your server ?

88. Where is rpm database stored ?

89. How to check architecture of rpm package ?

90. Without installing the package, how to check what files, it will install ?

91. How to upgrade version from RHEL 5.2 to 5.8

92. Can you edit /etc/redhat-release ?

93. How many packages are currently installed in the system ?

94. What do you understand with gpg check in repo file.

95. How to see which installed packages on your system needs updates ?

96. How to update all the packages and dependencies in system ?

97. How to list all the available repositories ?

98. How to rebuild the corrupted rpm database ?

99. How to find the entire information of an installed package ?

100. How to check the installation date of packages ?

101. What is yumdb command ?

102. Interview Questions: LVM and

Filesystem Basics

103. What is hard link and symbolic link ?

104. How to identify a link file ?

105. How to remove a link file ?

106. what are link counters ?

107. What are inodes ?

108. What is journalling ?

109. What are the differences between ext2, ext3 ,ext4 and xfs ?

110. What are the steps to create a new filesystem.

111. Why do I need LVM ?

112. What is difference between LVM1 and LVM2 ?

113. How to create a new filesystem using LVM ?

114. What is PE and LE ?

115. What is default size of PE and how can you customize it ?

116. How to save and restore the volume group configuration?

117. How to activate deactivate a volume?

118. How to extend/shrink a LV ?

119. What is LVM snapshot and its benefits?

120. What are all mounting options in defaults?

121. How to restore a corrupted/deleted /etc/fstab file ?

122. How to specify the pv size while creating a volume group ?

123. What is LVM mirroring, how to set it ?

124. How to change the maximum no. of LVs in a volume group ?

125. How to move a volume group from one system to another ?

126. How to rename a vg and lv ?

127. Interview Questions: RAID Management

128. What is RAID and its most common forms ?

129. Which one is better hardware or software raid ?

130. What is raid 0, 1, 5, 10 and 01 ?

131. How will you see status of your hardware raid ?

132. How to configure software raid

133. How to see status of software raid ?

134. How will you configure hardware raid ?

135. How to see specifications of hard disks ?

136. Interview Questions: Generic

137. What is the difference between tar, cpio and zip ?

138. On which port ssh, telnet, ftp, dhcp, dns , http, https, smtp , IMAP, LDAP
works?

139. What is tcp wrapper

140. How to install a kernel ?

141. Your password files has been deleted/corrupted. How will you restore ?

142. While unmounting there is a error, filesystem busy. What are the
remediation steps ?

143. How to create tar archive, how to see the archived contents and how to
extract ?

144. How to recover root password

145. How to check kernel and os version running

146. What is your default shell and how to change it ?

147. How to check serial no. of server ?

148. What are file attributes ? How to list and how to change ?

149. What are backup types? Difference between incremental and differential
backups ?

150. How to change the time zone ?

151. How to remount the / filesystem in writable mode.

152. How to extend the filesystem when lun is extended by storage team ?

153. What is sosreport and cfg2html

154. When the /etc/passwd file replicates to passwd-

155. What are global variables

156. Linux Interview Questions: Kernel and Modules

157. How to check the machines architecture ?

158. How to check the current kernel version running ?

159. How to see whether a module is loaded or no ?

160. How to load/unload a module ?

161. Where are kernel modules stored ?

162. How to find information about a module ?

163. How to upgrade your kernel ?

164. How to set kernel parameters?

165. Linux Interview Questions: Installation

166. What is kickstart installation?

167. What is daemon of kickstart ?

168. Where can you find the sample kickstart file on the server ?

169. What is PXE boot, let us know the steps.

170. What are the minumm partitions required to install Linux?

171. How to verify the validity of kickstart file?

172. What is major and minor nos.

Interview Questions: Process and

Services Management

173. How to start/stop a service ?

174. How to apply the changes without restarting a service?

175. What are transient and standalone services?

176. How to check all the running services in a runlevel?

177. How to check all the running process in a server?

178. What is a zombie process and how to tackle it ?

179. How to restart a hung process ?

180. What are various kill signals ?

181. What are xinetd services? How to enable telnet service on linux
server ?

182. How to change kernel parameters in linux ?

183. What is /etc/security/limits.conf file ?

184. How to check resource limits ?

185. How to run a process in background ?

186. What is Ctrl+C, Ctrl+D and Ctrl +Z signals in Linux ?

187. How to see all the logged in users on server ?

188. How to enable the service to be reboot persistent ?

189. what all information you can see with top command ?

190. What is nice value, how to change it ?

191. What is priority of a process and how to change it ?

192. What is syntax of cron scheduling?

193. What is anacron?

194. How to schedule cron in seconds ?

195. what is at command ?

196. Interview Questions: Linux System Monitoring

197. How to see all the mounted filesystems?

198. How to see current memory, cpu and swap utilization?

199. How to reduce the memory, cpu and swap utilization?

200. What are the various monitoring commands?

201. How SAR works?

202. How to see no. of CPUs installed in the system?

203. What is a bearable load average ?

204. How to see current runlevel?

205. What is inode and superblock

206. How to see inode utilization and how can they be increased ?

207. The df h and du sh have different space utilization. Why ?

208. What is proc filesystem ?

209. Interview Questions : Linux Boot Process

210. What is the boot process ?

211. Differentiate various run levels ?

212. What is Single User and Rescue mode ?

213. What are rc scripts ? How a run level switch happens ?

214. What is boot configuration file ?

215. How to restore corrupted GRUB?

216. What is PXE boot ?

217. How to put a boot password?

218. What is Single User Mode, Rescue Mode and Emergency Mode?

219. How to recreate mkinitrd ?

220. Your system is in maintenance mode (asking root password or
Ctrl+D), how will you troubleshoot ?

221. Someone has made runlevel 6 in the /etc/inittab file. How will you
correct the issue ?

222. Your system is in read only mode, how will you repair ?

223. What is sysV, systemd and upstart boot processes ?

224. How to clean inodes ?

225. How to take backup of MBR and how to restore it ?What is GPT ?

226. Interview Questions: SAN & Multipathing

227. How to find the WWWN no. ?

228. What is meaning of WWWN and WWPN nos ?

229. How to scan for new Luns ?

230. What are three dashes with echo ?

231. What is host0 in /sys/class/scsi_host

232. How to find how many hba cards you have in the system ?

233. Which hba cards you have in your environment ?

234. What modules are used for hba cards?

235. What is multipathing ?

236. How to see detailed output of multipath ?

237. How to find whether a disk is local or SAN disk ?

238. What is difference between SAN and NAS ?

239. What is iscsi and fcoe ?

240. Interview Questions: NFS and Samba

241. What is hard and soft mounting?

242. What are daemons for NFS ?

243. What is No Stale error in NFS ?

244. How to see which version of NFS is presently running ?

245. What is impact of version mismatch ?

246. What is no_root_squash ?

247. What is difference between nfs V3 and V4 ?

248. How to change nfs port in v3 ?

249. Why Samba is required?

250. What are Samba ports ?

251. What is CIFS ?