Sample questions for the final exam

1. What are the two types of backups and what levels are they?

2. What are some advantages of using dump: Give 5

3. How must a system administrator act like a medical professional?

4. Given the dump sequence 0 2 4 3 2 5, which dumps would you use for the restore?

5. How does a virtual OS interact with Hardware?

6. What is NIS used for?

7. What is a distributed Revision Control System?

8. What are three reasons you need restores from backups?

9. Explain the difference between the two types of Hypervisors.

1. What are the benefits of virtualization, and what is one situation where you would want to use a VM instead of a physical machine?

2. Where are NIS server data files stored?

3. What is the difference between a native system virtual machine and a hosted system virtual machine?

4. What are 2 operational benefits of virtualization?

5. What is the aim of a Virtual Appliance?

6. Suppose you are running a Windows machine, but you have a program that needs to run in a Linux environment. How can you run the program while still technically using your Windows machine?

7. If an FBI agent shows up at your office claiming he needs access to private information pertaining to an employee at your company what is the very first action that you should take?

8. How does CentOS modify and filter packets? When would this be useful? Name a possible alternative.

9. Which file would you modify to allow a computer to make use of a NIS database?

10. Suppose you are being hired to provide backup services for a third party. What are the important details that need to be included in the contract?

11. List two reasons why backups are essential.

12. From a security perspective, why is it preferable to have users authenticate with LDAP instead of NIS?

13. What is the difference between a native and a hosted virtual machine monitor (hypervisor)?

14. How would you ban access to a certain website using squid?

15. What are the different levels on the 'dump' command. What do they mean and what is the default level?

16. What 2 commands are necessary to mount a potentially corrupted lvm setup?

17. If a higher up manager comes to you, and asks you to read an email about an employee, how would you respond.

18. Name the three types of restores and the different kinds of customers

19. What is the difference between a virtual machine and a virtual appliance?

20. What is a virtual appliance and why would it be desirable over running services directly in your host operating system?

21. What are the associated benefits of using virtualization software? Give a few examples of each benefit...

22. What is the level of the dump that this command would start restoring with: restore -r ?

23. Why are incremental backups considered to be level 1, and what do the levels represent?

24. What are 2 benefits of Virtualization?

25. What are three reasons to need restores?

26. What is the advantage to using virtual appliances on servers to serve different functions rather than simply installing the processes on the machine?

27. Why are hot swappable parts desirable in a data center?

28. What is the name of a device that automatically changes removable media among a set of drives? (Hint: It's name is part of the title of a popular song released in 1981 by the rock band Foreigner)

29. Why should filesystem activity be restricted during dumps and how can this be achieved?

30. What are three different reasons to need to restore a file system?

31. List some advantages and disadvantages of using tapes for backup versus using other removable medias.

32. List 5 responsibilities of a system admin

33. What is the difference between REJECT and DROP in an iptable?

34. What could be an unforseen circumstance of keeping archived media backed up on proprietary media?

35. What's the difference between DROPping and REJECTing a packet with iptables?

36. As a system administrator, how often should you back up your systems?

37. /proc contains what type of files, and what is their use?

38. What are the differences between full backups and incremental backups?

39. What are the differences between rdist and rsync?

40. Why is it important to have a backup center that is not close to your main facility?

41. What is the difference between native and hosted virtual machine monitors?

42. What are the benefits of using virtualization software?

43. Describe in detail the reasoning behind using a Full+Incremental Backup policy.

44. Since a full backup uses so much more space than an incremental backup, why is it still prudent to do a full backup every few weeks?

45. What disasters do backups mitigate that would not be mitigated by redundancy (such as RAID)?

46. What is the main configuration file for apache?

47. What does line "/share auto_share" in /etc/auto_master mean?

48. What are some advantages of Subversion over CVS?

49. What is NAT and how does it improve network security?

50. What are appropriate temperature and humidity levels for a data center and why?

51. List several steps that a SA can take to prevent themselves from being accountable for suspicious/questionable requests.

52. Name 3 natural disasters that could affect your data center and how you would try to plan for them.

53. Given the following dump sequence, which tapes are required for restoration? (The numbers represent the backup levels as in the lecture notes. Underline the proper tapes from the following list) 0 4 5 4 4 5 3 9 3