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Systems Administrator Interview Questions

When you interview for a systems administrator position, interviewers will likely ask you questions that allow them to learn how you multitask and deal with problems. Expect to give specific examples about how you dealt with certain situations, and highlight your communication, troubleshooting, and technical skills.

Top Systems Administrator Interview Questions & How To Answer

Question 1

Question #1: If your company's website is down, how do you resolve the issue?

How to answer
How to answer: This open-ended question allows you to discuss your technical skills. Discuss how you identify the problem, troubleshoot the situation, and figure out why it happened. Your ability to stay calm and focused while you investigate the issue is also important.
Question 2

Question #2: How do you prioritize your tasks?

How to answer
How to answer: As a systems administrator, you're constantly monitoring the company's computer systems' performance and providing technical support to employees. Highlight your organizational skills and ability to multitask. Give specific examples of how different tasks require more attention than others.
Question 3

Question #3: Talk about a time when you initially failed to solve a system issue.

How to answer
How to answer: As a system administrator, it's vital to be able to overcome your inability to fix a problem and troubleshoot it. Focus on how you found a strategy that works instead of trying out different fixes until you solved the issue. Mention if the issue reached your professional limitations and you needed to use your communication skills to consult with others for assistance.

6,695 systems administrator interview questions shared by candidates

What is IPC? What are the various schemes available? The term IPC (Inter-Process Communication) describes various ways by which different process running on some operating system communicate between each other. Various schemes available are as follows: Pipes: One-way communication scheme through which different process can communicate. The problem is that the two processes should have a common ancestor (parent-child relationship). However this problem was fixed with the introduction of named-pipes (FIFO). Message Queues : Message queues can be used between related and unrelated processes running on a machine. Shared Memory: This is the fastest of all IPC schemes. The memory to be shared is mapped into the address space of the processes (that are sharing). The speed achieved is attributed to the fact that there is no kernel involvement. But this scheme needs synchronization. Various forms of synchronisation are mutexes, condition-variables, read-write locks, record-locks, and semaphores.
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Linux Systems Administrator

Interviewed at GoDaddy

3.9★
Jul 23, 2013

What is IPC? What are the various schemes available? The term IPC (Inter-Process Communication) describes various ways by which different process running on some operating system communicate between each other. Various schemes available are as follows: Pipes: One-way communication scheme through which different process can communicate. The problem is that the two processes should have a common ancestor (parent-child relationship). However this problem was fixed with the introduction of named-pipes (FIFO). Message Queues : Message queues can be used between related and unrelated processes running on a machine. Shared Memory: This is the fastest of all IPC schemes. The memory to be shared is mapped into the address space of the processes (that are sharing). The speed achieved is attributed to the fact that there is no kernel involvement. But this scheme needs synchronization. Various forms of synchronisation are mutexes, condition-variables, read-write locks, record-locks, and semaphores.

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