Shadowing Practice: Top 10 Linux Job Interview Questions - Learn English Speaking with Video

Hey, what's going on guys?

In this video we're going to cover the top 10 Linux interview questions.

These are the most common Linux system administration job interview questions that you'll find out in the wild.

So these are what you'll get in your first phone screen generally.

There will obviously be maybe more specific interviews after this, and it also depends on the position you're actually interviewing for.

Any given position might involve lots of other tech too.

While this covers the majority of the types of things that are asked during junior Linux sysadmin interviews.

You may also want to know the similar types of questions for databases, TCP /IP and networking, programming, or a specific programming language.

There may also be infrastructure or architecture questions if you're doing a more mid -level or senior type position.

Likewise, you may be asked about specific applications or services.

You can get mad, you can get sad, you can have lots of opinions about this, whatever.

This is just the reality for tech phone screens.

Your interviewer only has a couple of minutes to figure out if you're worth more time investment.

really regardless of what kind of job interview you're preparing for, if it involves Linux in some capacity, You should be really comfortable with these basic things.

If you haven't yet, make sure to check out my basic Linux system administration playlist, because it covers a lot of the theory and a lot of how Linux works.

behind what we're going to talk about. As a last...

piece of caution or word of advice Do not just memorize these things, because even if you make it through the first phone screen, they're going to be pretty pissed if it turns out

that you actually don't understand what you're doing after you make it through by memorizing answers to these basic questions.

Use these questions as a jumping off point for further exploration.

Okay.

So let's jump right in.

The first question you should immediately know the answer to is, How would you check the kernel version of the currently running system that you're on.

The answer is Uname.

Uname prints out system information.

specifically the -a, the a flag, uname -a will give you everything it's got.

So you've got your host name,

OS, kernel release kernel version, architecture, et cetera.

Thank you.

There's a couple small...

permutations of this that you can use.

So kernel version, and kernel release.

if you're looking for just those specific chunks of information, but that's Unim.

If someone asks you, how do you check the kernel version of the system or even What operating system is it running?

This is a fairly quick way to find out.

Another favorite question is, How would you go about checking what your current IP address is?

and this may come in a couple permutations like oh what's the current address on

the eth0 device or what's your current IPv6 address or what have you.

There's a couple ways to do this.

I'll show you the old and the new way.

The old ways, if config interface configuration, I've got a bunch of little devices here, don't worry about that.

This is the loopback device and this is our Ethernet device.

You can see our IPv4 address is here along with broadcast and subnet mask.

RIPv6, Address information can be found here.

Okay.

Now, if someone asks you for a specific interface, In general, you should be using the newer IP

tools command so IP adder we want the address show that gives you everything All of your devices.

or you can give another argument the device name.

So IP adder show. with zero.

As you can see, that gives you all the info for Ethernet Zero.

including IPv4, insider notation, How would you check for free disk space.

Other versions of this question are, you know, How would you check how much disk space is left, or what percentage of disk space you're using?

Don't get tripped up by different ways of asking these.

DF is your friend.

DF.

All file systems, human readable formatting.

So df space dash ah.

- Shh.

This will give you a readout of all of your file systems, including virtual file systems.

You can see our hard drive partitions are here. and R.

root, Partition is mounted on SDA one.

And you can see it's 5 .8 gigs of capacity.

We've used 5 gigs of that.

So we've got about half a gig left.

We're using 91%.

So DF, remember that, disk free.

Managing services is a completely normal part of being a Linux sysadmin or working with Linux in general.

So don't be surprised if someone asks you, "How would you see if a service is running?" Or, "How would you start or stop a service?" Or,

"How would you reload a service?" On any newer system, most major Linux distributions have switched to system D.

However, On an older system, you would have said...

either service I'll use Udev just as the service name.

This might be Nginx or MySQL or what have you.

Service name goes here.

Service Udev.

status checks status of a service uh start stop etc. are also arguments you can put at the end.

Service, service name.

and then what you want to do. to it.

on a newer system d system so something that is not running um Sys5Init or Upstart or another init system, you would use systemctl.

So this is the "new" version, quote unquote, if that's all you remember.

Systemctl status service.

Now, I'm on an old system.

I'm not using systemd.

This is a command not found.

But the important thing is it's system CTL, Status service name You'll notice that this is actually reversed the order

of the service or unit name argument, Systemd calls this a unit.

instead of a service.

But that's pretty much all you need to know.

It takes the same start /stop enable, disable, reload, etc. You can see I've got some some files and directories here.

How would you check the total size of everything inside of a given directory.

Thank you.

I'm going to say D -U -S -H.

We'll check the code directory.

Disk use, D -U.

Thank you.

This is going to go and tally that up.

So you can see I've got 80 megs worth of stuff in my code directory.

Nice and easy.

little bit more networking focused how would you check for open ports, let's say.

This question can be asked in a couple different ways.

check listening network sockets, open ports, you could say, services that are listening on TCP or UDP ports or sockets.

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So this question can come in a couple different versions, but if you hear, you know, network socket, listening, ports, TCP and UDP services,

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start thinking netstat because Netstat is what shows you that stuff.

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So by default, it gives you-- Basically, uselessly big output, it's meant to be filtered down with other Linux and Unix tools,

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So you'll probably want to run something like netstat.

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I like tu, so for TCP and UDP, LPN Listening Tulpan.

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Just remember that, and it's a pretty good shorthand for most times when you need this.

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Obviously, main netstat will get you the manual page for Netstat.

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More on that in a second.

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So this shows you the address and port that different things are listening on.

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I'm actually going to run this command as root because you'll see in a second, You can see on the right this...

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PID or program name, is actually blank for everything, because we're not root.

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Only root can see that.

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So if we say sudo then, So executed as root.

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you can see we now have all that extra information.

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Okay.

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So from left to right.

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What type of service is it?

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Well, it's TCP, IPv4.

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TCP /IPv6, UDP, UDP, I...

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IPv6, excuse me, getting a little excited here.

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the local address that it's listing on.

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The 0000 means all public addresses.

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Port 80.

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foreign addresses.

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Is it listening?

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And the process ID and name of the process-- so it actually looks up the process name from the PID--

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that owns this socket So you can see,

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Nginx, our web server, is listening on Port 80 and anyone on our local network that can get to our machine.

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can check out what we're hosting on our web server, 127, 001 is our local machine here.

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So this is actually not accessible from outside of our machine.

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Again, for more on that, you just learn a little bit more about networking, but this netstat -tulpn is extremely useful.

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And again, remember to run it as root if you can, because it just gives you that extra Okay, who is actually listening on that port is very interesting to know.

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How would you check CPU usage of a given process?

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You can run ps, AUX, then grep for your process name.

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This is a pipe.

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If you're not familiar with pipes, I highly suggest that you watch some of my basic shell videos.

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It's like a building block of Linux, and you should not be a sysadmin if that doesn't make sense So ps -aux, pipe it into grep and look for Nginx.

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You can see these are all the processes right now.

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in the process table that have Nginx in the name, and you can get some process information this way.

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The user it's running as, you can see the master process is running as root, the worker processes running as www data.

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et cetera, et cetera.

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You need to know how to parse this.

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Read up on P .S.

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Another way of doing this is top.

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You'll find top just about everywhere.

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So this is-- updated by default I think every seconds or two seconds.

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This gives you a lot more information, top.

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You can see by default it's ordered descending order by CPU.

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time percentage of cpu that it's using So this will be updated with your most CPU intensive processes, although you can change what it's sorted by.

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Likewise, it also gives you a bunch of other stats about memory, swap and use, load averages, et cetera.

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Nice alternative to this, although you won't find it installed by default, is HTOP.

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That's interesting to you.

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I like this, you can search it easily with like the slash key, search for some process.

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gives you a nice little graphical representation of the cores it sees, memory swap, et cetera.

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Nice and intuitive.

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So, That's how you sort of check what's going on with processes, what users own a process, what a process is running as,

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and things like CPU, memory usage, etc. How would you mount...

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some kind of new volume, let's say a new hard drive partition, that you just plugged in, let's say a USB stick.

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How would you mount that in your system?

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Well, Linux will generally have a directory called mount, En route.

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And that is sort of the canonical place to mount things.

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So to mount a new volume, you would say, Mount is the command.

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And then the Absolute path to the volume.

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So if it's a device like let's see it's a hard drive partition SDA 2.

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It's the second partition on the SDA hard drive and You could say amount.

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address and then the mount point.

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If I just wanted to mount it on Mount MNT, This would be the command.

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Thank you.

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Likewise, checking for existing mounts

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is just the mount command without any So you can see here's what's mounted and the mount options it's got.

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And you also get a file system type.

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So X4, got a butterfs here, on and on last little trick on mount just because it's fast um

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If you automatically need to mount a volume at boot, what file would you look in?

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The answer is, "etcfs -tad".

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If we take a quick look at that file, you can see this is our disk partitions that we want.

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So this is SDA1 and it's UUID, unique device ID.

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and our swap partition, sda5, with its unique ID, so that we can find that.

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at boot time.

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when i generally make changes to config files um

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that are not part of a larger system like just on my desktop so not as part of a

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business configuration management setup

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I like to just leave my name in there just

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so I can quickly grep for files that have this string in them, so that I can see everything that I've changed on a system.

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that isn't in some kind of configuration management or automatic provisioning script.

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Finally, the very, very most important thing Mad pages you will get asked how you look stuff up.

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How do you find answers to questions?

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Your first answer to this should be, if it's a command, I look at the man pages, the manual pages.

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So man, command, gets you there.

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So for example, man ps, you want to know all the options you could pass to ps.

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It's kind of a big command.

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Here are all the interesting things you can do with it.

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Generally, man pages have sort of Name of the commands, basic synopsis, the way you call it,

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So the syntax we're calling it a description of the commands, a mini, very dense tutorial usually, Thank you.

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And some examples, BSDs are a lot better than most Linux distros for this, but you hope to find an example section at the bottom.

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In this case, you've got an example section here, although this is often missing depending on what the command is.

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and then a listing of all the options in detail.

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You can see this is a very old and Well -documented command.

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Other than man, Google server fault Stack Overflow.

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These are good answers in an interview.

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You should know multiple ways of finding answers to questions If you haven't read it yet, I will link it here.

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But the How to Ask Smart Questions or How to Ask Questions the Smart Way article

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is required reading for anybody in tech.

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So I hope that's been useful.

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If you want more of these, either more for Linux, for higher level Linux questions, or for other sort of skill silos like databases,

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networking, programming, infrastructure, cloud stuff, applications and services, I'd be happy to make more of these videos.

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So if they're helpful.

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Leave a comment with stuff you'd like to see covered

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subscribe for more if you haven't already check out the basic sysadmin skills

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playlist because there's just a whole lot of background stuff you need to know. in there.

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So good luck on your job hunt and in your interviews, and maybe we'll run across each other in real life sometime.

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Thanks for watching, guys.

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