Tough interview questions.

Fri Aug 13 12:23:42 PDT 2004

On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 12:09:00PM -0700, Michael T. Halligan wrote:
> I have to interview somebody I don't want to hire in about 1/2 hour..
> Management wants him because he's their cronie.  What are people's favorite
> "give them a tough time" interview questions?

Explain how you'd distinguish between the Tahoe and Reno TCP/IP stack
implementations.  Describe the strengths and weaknesses of each.

A machine for which you're responsible has suffered a catostrophic disk
failure.  Backups are not available.  Reinstallation is not an option.
Explain the steps you'd take to recover the data on the system.

Explain the impact of the receive window, packet size, and Nagle algorithm 
on the SMB and NFS protocols.  Provide off-the-cuff optimal setting for
the first two for each protocol.  Include (and describe) each
implementation of NFS.

Explain the benefits and drawbacks of TCP v. UDP DNS sessions, and their
impact on system load, session count, and transfer rate.

Explain how memory leaks work.

Explain how buffer overflow attacks work, and describe three means to
mitigate such attacks.

Explain the current weaknesses inherent in WPA and WEP.  Describe a
secure method of integrating wireless networking into an existing
corporate infrastructure.

Describe in detail the boot process of $OS.  Be as specific as possible.

-- 
Mark C. Langston            GOSSiP Project          Sr. Unix SysAdmin
mark at bitshift.org   http://sufficiently-advanced.net    mark at seti.org
Systems & Network Admin      Distributed               SETI Institute
http://bitshift.org       E-mail Reputation       http://www.seti.org