Unix Interview questions:
1. How to find out how much CPU, RAM the m/c has.?
2. How to find out the network port is running at what speed?
3. What is setuid and setgid ?
4. What is the difference between UDP and TCP?
5. What is subnetting, netmask?
6. How can you lock the remote login of root, which means don’t allow root to login from anywhere except console?
7. How to change the no of times ‘retry’ is allowed for login (when u login with wrong passwd, by default allows for 5 times, for example)?
8. What is rarp and how do u check the arp cache?
9. How do you create a swapfile?
10. How to check at what speed is the network card running in solaris, linux?
11. What are the 3 fields in top that show system load figures? If you have 4 processors and one process is showing 25% usage in top what does that mean?
12. How will you know which of the resources memory, disk usage or cpu is running low or is the bottleneck? How do you check these params?
13. What is jumpstart/kickstart? What is the need? Can you jumpstart machines across subnets, how?
14. How do you configure system event logging? What is loghost?
15. What is the use of the utility dd? How do you take a dd of an entire hard disk?
16. What is IP multipathing, have you used it before?
17. What is dfstab and vfstab for ?
18. What is automounter? Have you used it before, what is the purpose?
19. What are soft, hard links - do you know of any examples where these are typically used.
20. What is sticky bit, which filesystem has it set by default?
21. What are the different file system types? What is difference between UFS, ext2, ext3?
22. How do u achieve to execute some command before each time a prompt is displayed, before each time you logout?
23. How do you display the directory usage of /home for each user? Or how do you find out which user is consuming the most amount of disk space?
24. How do you cut columns 1 to 5 from a given output?
25. How do you find disk drive statistics or how many disks are connected to your system currently?
26. In shell scripting what does 2>&1 mean?
27.How to change the hostname/ip address on solaris/linux?
28. How do you kill all processes of a given user in a single command?
29. How do you monitor which processes are taking max cpu/mem?
30. What are rlogin, rsh, telnet used for? What are the differences?
31. Have you used scripting – shell / perl? 32. Is there a diff between bourne , korn and c shell scripting?
If you are used to writing k shell scripts and you go to a new environment where they use tcsh by default, what will you do – will you learn how to write c shell scripts or is there a way you can continue using your k shell scripting knowledge and still write scripts?
33. A given server is overloaded by users, you can’t telnet or rsh into that server. What will you do next, is there any other way to access this server and prevent a hard reboot?
34. How do you disable telnet or ftp on a given server? How do you disable these for a specific user and allow a specific group of users to access at the same time on the same server?
35. You try to login to a server (say using telnet) as root and you are not allowed to login and you get a message “not on system console” what does this mean?
36. If you run a GUI based app (eg. Browser) on server A, whereas you are sitting on server B, how do you see the application on server B?
37. What protocol does ping command use?
38. What is tftp, have you used it before. Do you know one application where it is used?
39. What is loopback, why do you need the line localhost in /etc/hosts file?
40. For sun or linux how to you install packages such that you can rollback?
41. What is RAID? How is it useful? What are the different types?
42. How do you see what messages a system printed on the console while it was booting up?
43. If you are given a machine for which you do not know the root password, can you reset it? How?
Vi or Vim
44. In vi how do you remove the ^M from a DOS file?
45. How do you do a global search and replace in vi?
46. How do you copy , paste or delete 10 lines or a paragraph?
47. If you want to see line numbers in vi, how do you turn them on/off?
48. How do you move to end /beginning of a line, or end of a file?
49. How do you save a copy of a file while in vi?
50. How do you execute a unix command while still in vi?
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