Preparations questions for entry-level Data Center technician position?

Note: My apologies if this is in the wrong forum, please move if necessary.

Hello,

I have been in the IT field for the past 7+ years, however in recent years I have only been doing website development. I have alot of general knowledge but everything is self taught. I currently have no certs but am working on attaining some.

If you were hiring someone for an entry level position in a Data Center either as a server/network admin, or technical support what are some questions you would ask the applicant?

My knowledge is not entry-level but I want to hone my skills and expand my knowledge as right now I have a very general skill set. Some might disagree but to me it just feels right lol.

I have an upcoming interview and want to prepare for it.

Thank you in advance for your advice and questions .

hmm - depends on the environment in the network. I cant really speak for Windows networks as I havent ever been an admin of one, but as for *nix networks… some questions might go a bit like this (to a fulltime admin, for a parttime/tech support guy they’d be easier):

  • how would you proceed to check the security of a Linux system?
  • what is iptables and how do you use it
  • can you write me a shell script + cronjob for backing up all html files in directory /home/myuser/bla every 2 hours
  • do you know nginx? if yes - is it better than Apache in your opinion?
  • why isnt it a good idea to do everything as root?
  • how would you go about optimizing the performance of a MySQL database server?
  • could you set up Kerberos? how fast? how about Samba?
  • can you sketch roughly how public key cryptography works?

these are just some ideas - but all stuff I might ask in a real interview.