System Administrator Interview

jmreicha

So I have an interview coming for a position as a System Administrator (mainly as a Linux admin) at a University. I originally applied for it not really thinking I would hear back but apparently they want me to come down next week.

For this position, the hiring manager told me in an email that he will have a lab set up for the interview, what if possible should I be prepared for? I have never done one of these so I don't know really what to expect.

Also, the description asks for 3 years relative enterprise exp and only have about 1. I am starting to think I'm in over my head here and am second guessing if I should have applied. Does anybody have any advice for a situation like this?

tldr; Linux admin interview with lab, what to expect for lab portion?

TimTheEnchantor

If your resume indicates you have 3 years experience when you have 1, then yes you might be.

Worst thing they can do is say no - right?

Dakinggamer87

Good luck on interview!!

undomiel

This sounds like a potentially excellent job interview. You'll be able to demonstrate your skills, not just talk about them. Right now any Linux studies you put in without direction would most likely not help, assuming you only have a few days to prepare. Just be confident in the skills you currently have and be excited to show them off to a potential employer. What you could do though is put in as much research as you can into their operations and see what you can mine out.

jmreicha

TimTheEnchantor wrote: »

If your resume indicates you have 3 years experience when you have 1, then yes you might be.

Worst thing they can do is say no - right?

Sorry, to clarify I have more than 3 years experience total but only 1 year of admin experience.

MentholMoose

If it's a Linux sysadmin job, you should probably prepare to do some tasks on Linux machines. I would guess it would include routine troubleshooting stuff... check why a machine is "slow", why a web server is not accessible, what process has a particular file open, or why network connectivity is wrong. Besides that, maybe some routine tasks like resetting a root password, creating a user, checking/configuring IP settings, creating a cron job, or getting some daemon to work.

These are things that really wouldn't take a lot of time... I don't think they'd ask you to do something complicated and time consuming. They might ask you questions about tasks that are time consuming, though. For example in an interview I had a while ago, I was asked to describe the process of compiling a custom Linux kernel. This is something that might take a long time to perform in a lab, but you can explain it in a few minutes.

Forsaken_GA

If I were conducting the lab exam, I'd throw a mix of softball, midrange, and really tough stuff at you, just to see what you were capable of. I wouldn't expect you to get all of it, but it'd be nice to see how good your range is.

Most of the simple stuff would be like can you mount an NFS or Samba share? Can you partition a disk? Can you format and mount that partition?

Mid-range stuff would be more along the lines of can you add swap to a system without repartitioning (easy as hell, but I'm constantly amazed at the lack of people who are aware of the option, let alone can actually do it). Can you configure the server to authenticate via LDAP? Can you setup remote logging? Can you troubleshoot mixed library version problems?

For the hard stuff, it'd be something along the lines of configure lighttpd or nginx to serve static content, but proxy all dynamic content to apache (again, pretty easy.... if you already know how to do it). And just because it's one of my personal vendetta type things, I'd make you compile ffmpeg from source with libx264 support.

TimTheEnchantor

jmreicha wrote: »

Sorry, to clarify I have more than 3 years experience total but only 1 year of admin experience.

Then everything above suggested to you is worth doing.

jmreicha

Thanks for the all the feedback, these suggestions are awesome. It looks like I should start getting ready