IT Job Interview

Not just give a list of shells you have used, try to describe some of the key features of the shells, showing you have the real experience on them.

“I got used to the Bourne shell for early versions of Unix.  Then I become accustomed to the Korne shell and happen to like it very much.   It has more functions than that in vi or Emac.  The interactive command line editor is so wonderful.  It has built-in environment variables which allow for a customized environment.”

Then, a follow-up question might be, what’s your experience in shell programming?  A good answer is to give a few examples about what scripts you have written to accomplish what tasks.

“Having a number of years’ experience using the shell, I have become very accustomed to shell programming.  Script writing is almost second nature and I could apply the technique to all phases of systems administration.  I have written scripts that perform automatic system backup during low CPU utilization hour.  I have written interactive scripts which help to restore files to the system, scripts which can add or remove a user from the system, and xripts for new system installation.”

‘Cron’ is a command whose services are initialized when the system is brought up in multiuser mode.  When loaded, it executes commands at specified dates and times.  It runs in background as a clock daemon until it is killed either by the ‘super’ user or when the system shuts down or ‘init’ed in a mode that kills it.  The cron daemon wakes up once a minute to see if anything needs to be run.  Heavily loaded systems many expect a delay of a few minutes.

These commands are specified in a specially formatted file in the ‘/usr/spool/cron/crontabs’ or ‘var/spool/cron/crontabs’ directory.  The file that executes ‘super’ user commands can be found in the root file.  Regular users may also submit jobs to ‘cron’ deamon as long as they have ‘cron’ permission.

This is a hands-on experience question.  The following answer is for UNIX platform.

The first step is to assign a unique internet address to the workstation.  The net-mask has to be assigned the same as other devices in that subnet.  The physical device has to be attached to the network, and the workstation connected.  When attaching the Attachment Unit Interface (AUI), you must make sure that it corresponds with the jumper setting on the unit.

Next, the system should be booted.  At this point, you should ping another workstation or server using its IP address.  If the ping works properly, the next step would be to change the /etc/hosts, /etc/netmasks, /etc/defaultdomain to include all the necessary information required by the system to recognize the network automatically upon booting.  If this system was a client or diskless workstation in an NIS network, then the ‘domainname’ command can be set appropriately or changed in /etc/defaultdomain and rebooted, which will cause it to connect to its NIS master.

Daemons are processes that are run when the system is initialized and continue to run while the system is in operation.  Their purpose is to wait in the background until their services are required.

The most common daemon is the cron daemon.  Here are more examples:  rpc.mountd, nfsd, mountd & biod (NFS daemons), lpd (line printer daemon), rlogind, telnetd (telnet server daemon), routed (network routing daemon), rwhod (remote who daemon).

Obviously, the interviewer wants to know if you have any hands-on skills on UNIX network troubleshooting.  If you do have the experience, you must have used the following handy tools:

Netstat – Shows the status of the network.
Ping – Sends packets to a destination address and tracks the performance of packets round trip.
Spray – sends packets (like ping_ but, instead of one packet, it sends a burst of packets for greater duration, putting a simulated load on a network component to better test its communications.
Ifconfig – Can be used to ascertain useful network information as well as to configure the network port.
Etherfind – gives network information about all network traffic passing through the network connection.

An organization used the following question list to interview candidates for a Senior IT Specialist position. This organization was hiring staff for developing and managing in-house enterprise application systems running on Siebel Call Center environment with Oracle database on Windows platform. (more…)

A government agency funded a 3-year project for data integration/consolidation among several agencies. A couple of Information System Analyst positions were planned to be filled for this project. After the initial interview, selected candidates scheduled for the second interview. The following questions were asked in the second interview. (more…)

A government agency funded a 3-year project for data integration/consolidation among several agencies. A couple of Information System Analyst positions were planned to be filled for this project. The interview process is outlined below. At start of the interview, a written description of the position and the project was given to the candidate. The candidate had a few minutes to read the description. Then interview questions followed. (more…)