updated interview questions - sys admin
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Interview Questions [Sr.] Windows Systems Administrator
General Questions
1. What makes you a team player? Give an example of something in your past that shows you are a team player.
2. Do you believe in split administration models?
3. How do you feel about being on call?
4. Do you have a preference about Red Hat or Windows5. Was there an occasion when you disagreed with a supervisors decision or company policy? Describe how you
handled the situation.
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6. Why do you want to come to work Here? What do you know about OIT at Here?
7. How do you handle disagreements in a group when working toward a goal? Give an example.
8. Give me a specific example of a time when you used good judgment and logic in your current position.
9. Describe a time when you anticipated potential problems and developed preventive measures.
10. Tell us about your highest professional achievement.
11. Describe a time when you had to deal with conflicting demands, how did you deal with this situation and what
was the outcome?
12. Was there an occasion when you disagreed with a supervisors decision or company policy? Describe how you
handled the situation.
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13. What do you believe are the greatest strengths that you would bring to this position? What about your
weaknesses?
Experience Questions
14. What you think of the Windows Server 2008? What do you think systems administration will look like in the next
5-10 years?
15. Describe your systems administration experience.
16. Please describe your Active Directory experience.
17. What experience have you had in giving presentations, project management, proposal writing, RFPs etc?
18. Have you ever managed or handled Oracle client distribution in active directory or Oracle memory/cpu resource
management in VMWare? Explain.
19. What type of other relational database software experience do you have? Explain.
20. Would you please tell us about any experience you have working with networking, firewall and system security
technologies?
21. Would you please tell us about the backup & recovery strategies employed by you in your previous positions?
22. Please tell us about your experiences with server clustering and load balancers.
23. What would you say your comfort level is taking apart and re-assembling a server to fix a hardware issue?
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24. Please tell us about your experiences working with SAN or other shared storage technologies.
Technical Questions
25. Should we deploy IPSEC-based security or certificate-based security?
a. They are really two different technologies. IPSec secures the TCP/IP communication and protects the
integrity of the packets. Certificate-based security ensures the validity of authenticated clients and servers.
26. What is LMHOSTS file?
a. Its a file stored on a host machine that is used to resolve NetBIOS to specific IP addresses.
27. Describe how a DHCP lease is obtained.
Its a four-step process consisting of (a) IP request, (b) IP offer, (c) IP selection and (d) acknowledgement
28. How can you recover a file encrypted using EFS?Domain recovery agent in a domain and the data recovery agent outside of a domain.
29. How do you install recovery console?
C:\i386\winnt32.exe/cmdcons, assuming that your Win server installation is on drive C.
30. How many objects will AD comfortably scale to handling?
5 million total users, computers, etc
31. What is the purpose of AD Read Only servers?
enable caching of information across slow links, DMZ Security
32. Why does one create additional application pools in IIS?so one cgi/isapi doesn't take all the resources from other apps
33. What purpose does limiting connections to IIS serv?
so that when under heavy load, people get a 'Service Unavailable or custom notification as opposed to just a
browser time-out
34. What is an admin install point and what does it mean to slip-stream?
an admin install point is used for an networked (and usually automated) install if windows and slip streaming is
the process of installing Service Packs and Patches directly to the admin install point
35. Can a Windows 2003 Server still share files if the following ports are not enabled: 135, 137, 138,
139? If so, how? What would you disable to ensure those ports are not used? Can this be done in amixed-mode domain? Why or why not?
Yes, over port 445. Disable NetBIOS over TCP. It cannot be done a mixed-mode domain. Windows NT
machines still require NetBIOS.
36. I manage a lab environment of Windows XP machines in an active directory domain, what can I
use to ensure all my users (staff, faculty, students, guests) experience the same restricted
workstation?
Group policy loopback processing (replace mode NOT merge mode).
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37. Is Microsoft DNS required for AD? If not, what must the DNS server support?
No. It must support SRV resource records (service records).
38. What are the three group types in AD? Are all three present in mixed-mode?
Global, universal, domain local. No, universal isnt available in mixed-mode.
39. If you had a SAS (serial attached SCSI) drive fail in a server, but didnt have an identical spare,what would you do?
There really isnt one answer for this question. Could use a different SAS drive (no RAID wasmentioned) or a SATA drive.
Conclusion Questions
40. Please share with us your philosophy about customer service in an academic environment and give us some
examples of service that would illustrate your views.
41. In your current position what type of decisions do you make without consulting your immediate supervisor?
42. What 3 positive things would your last manager say about you?
43. What are your long term professional goals?
44. What skills do you feel you would need to develop for this position?
45. Are you willing to work overtime, on-call, and weekends when necessary?
46. What are your salary requirements?