JWSmythe's Journal: Application Test Answers - Part 1

G'morning.

    For those who don't know, I'm hiring for a Jr. SysAdmin in Glendale, CA. The pay is $700/week. You'll be directly responsible for 60 servers here in LA, plus about 60 more in two other cities that you may never actually see. You will be one of a three person team. With a few exceptions, all servers are Linux machines. You'll also be responsible for helping office staff with their typical PC problems (email, connectivity, printers, etc)

    As advertised, we're willing to accept someone with limited "work" experince, which I ment to mean someone who's been using Linux at home and knows it very well, although they may not have job experience with it.

    If you think you'd be interested in a position like this, please write to JWSmythe AT CGICoders DOT com

    Below are the answers to 3 technical questions I asked in the initial email, to see if they had a grasp of the topic. If you were to hire, who would you consider? The numbers beside the answers indicate which applicant answered. These are the actual supplied answers, I didn't modify any of it.

Q1) You have a server that 'someone' accidently deleted rc.inet1 on
  (the init script which starts up the network interfaces), and
  rebooted. You know this server should have the IP's of 123.123.99.102 and 192.168.1.102 (both of a /24). 123.123.99.102 uses the gateway 123.123.99.1 . The private network doesn't have a gateway. Please show the ifconfig and route commands to manually bring this server back up on the network.

    1)
/sbin/ifconfig lo 192.168.1.102 /sbin/route add -net 255.255.255.0

    2)
  ifconfig eth0 123.123.99.102 255.255.255.0 123.123.99.1
  ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.102 255.255.255.0

    3) As I've mostly used RedHat whch contains a graphical interface for setting network configuration I have no experience with ifconfig or route commands

    4)
/sbin/ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1
/sbin/route add -net 127.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 lo
/sbin/route add -net 123.123.99.102 netmask 255.255.255.0
  NETWORK ="123.123.99.0"
  BROADCAST ="123.123.99.255"
  GATEWAY="123.123.99.1"
/sbin/route add -net 192.168.1.102 netmask 255.255.255.0

  NETWORK="192.168.1.0"
  BROADCAST="192.168.1.255"

Q2) Using standard programs such as tail, cut, and grep, show how to find the most requested file from the last 1000 lines of an Apache access log, assuming the log lines are the 'combined' format.

    1) I don't remember.

    2) tail -1000 access_log

    3) I believe something like tail -n 1000 /var/log/apache.combined.log | grep with
"%r\" field + some othe modifiers and then | cut command to further refine this. These are comands that I haven't used much, so this is my best guess at how to put these things together

    4) tail 1000 /var/log/access_log |cut |grep

Q3) Someone on staff reports that a machine is acting "funny". You happen to be at the colo, so you get on the console, and notice the prompt doesn't look right. You also notice an extra copy of 'init' running with a high PID. What do you do?

    1) (Call 911) Maybe I'm mistaken but I think only one init can run at a time (parent of all processes). Since I'm not experience with something like that, I would: make a note on the machine log, call my supervisor and give him/her the news and request help. If no supervisor, reboot and see what happens.

    2) kill that process, checking the active network connections, checking server uptime, verifying the logs

    3) This seems to me to indicate that some process is running that shouldn't be. A change in prompt would indicate that the working directory isn't a normal occurance. Using the PID to stop the process would seem to be attempted to restore a normal function to the machine. Checking the /etc/init.d file to see if there are/is an unusal entry(s) that might have caused this to start up. My guess is that a virus or other attempt at taking control of the machine had occured. Checking the logs for a connection or request to see when this mighthave started or where it originated would also be helpful. Most definately I'd alert any senior authority if this looked in any way intentional other then just due to a corrupted file or directory, but this shouldn't happen unless some one granted the process a permission somehow or had set some sort of privellege.

    4) We got to stop the extra copy of init which is running. So we can use kill -9 PID (of the extra init process) and then logout and log in again

Lucky You

[OctaneZ]

Have fun picking... you may be better off with a shell spcipt named "John Smith"... just have his paycheck made out to cash and sent to your office.

Lessee...

[Saint Aardvark]

Q1 -- #1 and #3 are pretty bad...anyone who doesn't know that eth0 is (probably) the interface in question, or who has never been motivated to learn the commands to set up an interface (and the fact that that amazes me says a lot about my priorities :-), is...um, hard to imagine working with. #4 may get a half-point for thinking he (let's assume they're all male) could find another machine to copy the script from, but still -- it's obvious he has no idea what the script does, or how to do it manually. #2

Re:Lessee...

[JWSmythe]

Thanks, you did the dirty work of scoring for me. :) I'd rather get someone with 2.5+ points, but....

Based on some of the other questions that I didn't post (experience, and the like) a couple of them sound propsective. One of them was really pushy in their cover letter, and sent their answers as a word document (ummm, MS format for a Linux job?). Actually, of the 70 resumes received, 68 were in MS Word documents. Two also included PDF's. One copy&pasted his resume into the Email "for my pro

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Lessee...

[JWSmythe]

You just wanna hire _me_, huh? ;)

If you were local, I probably wouldn't have needed to start asking for applicants. :) Unfortunately, part of this job includes dragging your butt down to the colo to fix broken stuff, which kinda excludes you.

What I did notice though, is that #3, for someone who doesn't know eth0, he all of a sudden knows a lot about what to look for by question 3. I have to say, I kind of like #1, purely for his honesty. :) That's the guy I'd probably end up hiring, because I coul

for $700 a week you want competance?

[bongoras]

for $36000 a year in SoCal, your Jr SysAdmin's gonna be living in a cardboard box anyhow.

Re:for $700 a week you want competance?

[JWSmythe]

For this pay, I want a 19 year old kid who's been using Linux at home for the last 4 years, and building their own kernels for 2 years. Their job choices may be McD or Von's at $280/week or us at $700/week. I'm not looking for the guy with the million dollar house and a stack of degrees. It's for someone who can keep things running while I sleep occasionally.

Re:for $700 a week you want competance?

[jea6]

I hate to keep coming back to this (I do because it amuses me) but this kid is going to have perks. The perky kind. All day long. Most 19 year olds might pay $700 a week (if they had it).

Re:for $700 a week you want competance?

[JWSmythe]

Hehe.

Ya, I guess having passwords to a whole bunch of porn sites would be a perk for a kid. :)

My biggest perk is that I have my server in a nice colo on a GigE line, and I don't pay for anything (space, bandwidth, etc). And when I want to download something, I just download it to a server, and take the laptop to the colo to copy it off for myself.

I've started mirroring Slackware [lmlinux.com] (unofficially), so we can run automated patches against the archive. I also mirror Slashdot links [lmlinux.com], so when a serv

Know anyone looking for that kind of job...

[draziw]

In the San Fernando Valley? ~40k a year. :) Having a hard time finding anyone with troubleshooting skills...