On several occasions I’ve been asked to interview people for system administrator position. Every time this raised an issue – what do I ask them?

When assessing someone’s ability to program you are in a better position. For starters you can check their ability to break down the problem into distinctive functions, then see how they go about creating effective algorithms for each function, etc, etc. With system administration is rather different. There are no “global” questions to ask just lots of “local” ones, if you see what I mean.

It is hard to judge someone who fails to recall some option to a command line and who otherwise is an excellent system administrator.

So this is my attempt to compile a list of questions that would help you to assess someones ability in system administration field. I’m trying to steer away from very specific question, but unfortunately it is not always possible, and the details is exactly what you want to find out.

Anyway, most of the questions are guidelines for a discussion, as I think only during the discussion you can get an idea of how person is thinking and whether he or she would be a good system administrator. In most cases there is no right or wrong answer. I also do not provide any answers at all, but each question or topic is a post with open comments. So please put your answers or thoughts there, best ones will be picked and post will get updated with them.

You can also use this to refresh your knowledge in system administration area!

You can find all questions here, in no particular order