Preparing for a technical interview - SUSE questions

[wheresmybacon]

I've got an interview today for a systems engineer position, and one of the topics that will be covered that is probably my weak point is SUSE administration. For you longtime *NIX nerds, if you could offer some example questions or tips on what you think I should brush up on, I'd be much obliged. To be more specific, SUSE 10 application servers running on top of ESX hosts (VMs).

I've got some Linux experience, having built, configured, and deployed 25 SUSE 10 boxes in my last position, however when compared with my Microsoft knowledge I'm a Linux baby.

Also is it frowned upon to use YAST or for that matter doing administration @ runlevel 5? I like the command line, but to be honest I'm usually breaking out the man pages with most things simply because it's not second nature to me.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

 

[Nothinman]

I don't have any real experience with SuSE, but anyone who's comfortable admining Linux will be doing a lot of work from the command-line. I would only ever install X unless it was explicitly required by whatever software it'll be running, like recent releases of Oracle.

It really all depends on how much they expect you to know up front and how much they're willing to let you learn on the job. If they know you've got some experience but not a lot you could probably get by with some basics about installing, updating and removing packages with rpm. How permissions work and how to change them with chmod, chown, etc. Enabling and disabling services with chkconfig (I think SuSE comes with that) or managing the symlinks manually.

Even those of us with lots of experience break out man pages a lot because we can't retain everything. Knowing where to find the answer is usually just as good as knowing the answer up front.

 

[wheresmybacon]

Cool. I feel a little bit better now. I can do that stuff. Thanks

 

[wheresmybacon]

Update:

The interview went well, but I didn't get the job. They needed a Tivoli SME and I have virtually no Tivoli experience. Anyway, the Linux part of the technical grilling went fine. They asked some basic questions about the syslog, ssh, chmod and some other crap.

Now back to my regularly scheduled server administration...