Need some help for upcoming interview

Hi guys. I have been invited to a face to face (I just passed their phone interview), for a junior IT support engineer role in a data centre. The interview is going to feature a technical test that's a bit more involved then any I’ve done before. Rather then explaining it myself I’ll just quote from my email directly.

You will be provided with some virtual machines running a brand new installation of CentOS Linux and will have access to the Internet. These Linux servers will only have command line access (there will be no graphical interface), so you will be using a provided SSH client. You will be asked to demonstrate how at least one of these machines could be configured to display a simple website. For example, the machines will not have a web server installed, so this will be one of the first steps needed. The website need do nothing more than display some text.

The purpose of this demonstration is for you to show your approach to learning new technologies. If you have no experience of achieving something like this, then you only need illustrate that you have learned the basics. Getting to a working solution is not a requirement, but being able to discuss in detail what you did achieve is critical. If you would already be confident in doing this, then we’d expect you to elaborate on the scenario to demonstrate having learned something new. You will be given an hour to prepare the environment and then the interviewer will come back to ask questions.

So would I be correct in saying what I need to do here is to install Apache? I vaguely remember a pluralsight instructor do this for one of my CCNA lab vids. I think you just needed to install the LAMP stack or something like that? Sorry about my lack of knowledge, I’m still a noob at linux. I have ubuntu server running samba and plex, but that took quite a bit of research to setup. I’ll spin up a CentOS vm or 2 to practice for this upcoming test. I’m assuming most commands are the same between CentOS and ubuntu? I’d also guess that networking will need setting up and maybe even dns if they want this site displayed by name instead of host ip?

Also at end of the email they mention “If you would like to request anything specific you would like to demonstrate please let us know.” Is this an opportunity to show off? Go beyond the main goal of the practical? Any advice you lot have would help a lot!

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Comments

swamprat

You're on the right path with Apache (though many would say touse NGINX instead, but I'm old fashioned). You wouldn't need the full lamp stack if it's just displaying some text, Apache alone would be fine.

ssh to server
sudo yum install httpd mod_ssl (This installs apache)
y
sudo /usr/sbin/apachectl start

etc (Check this site out) https://support.rackspace.com/how-to/centos-6-apache-and-php-install/

Wouldnt' be a bad idea to skip the firewall step first, then show examining netstat and iptables (confirming http is listening on 80, so proceeding to next step of troubleshooting and opening port in firewall)

Nik 99

Thx swamprat. I'll be going over this in detail and then lab it out after.

techfiend

Just be safe, learn how to write an index.html to display specific text. Good luck!

yoba222

Sounds like you'll only need the LA part of the LAMP stack. The MP is for accessing the database and server-side rendering of a web page, which is beyond the scope of this test. Install an Apache server and code up a quick html page, maybe with 2-3 lines of css to make it beyond ascii text output on the web page.

If you wanted to be arrogant, you could probably do this in 5 minutes with a python one-liner using the http.server module, but I think Apache is the path they want. Installing bare-bones Apache was part of the LFCS exam I took last year.

Nik 99

I've successfully done the practical test now.

At the start of the practical my interviewer showed off their page for creating and running the VM's. He actually said I could fire up more then 1 CentOS vm and / or some windows server vm's too. At that point I was wondering why would you need more then 1 or a windows server vm? Maybe they expected some candidates to show off more then was mentioned in the email...?

Their version of centos wasn't just a fresh minimal install, which is what I'd been practicing on so I kept encountering little things that threw me off. One such thing was firewalld not being active and running by default (and it was masked). I installed the whole lamp stack (httpd, mariadb-server, mariadb, php php-mysql) and got firewalld configured to allow my services through. Also created an index.html. I couldn't get my head around html code in the time that I had so only displayed simple text in it.

I explained what I'd done to my interviewer and showed off apache serving the page. For the next stage of the practical he broke my setup so I could fix it. I did manage to troubleshoot it. He changed a line in httpd config file and altered the permissions on the index.html so it couldn't be accessed.

Thanks for all the help you guys offered