UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I went for an interview this morning. The questions I was asked....

1. On Redhat, you have downloaded a program called XYZ. You did all kinds update to this program. Now you are ready to move this to production. How would you do it?

He already said he doesn't want to use "tar & dump” He wants to move this as software.

I remember in Solaris, there is a tool pkgmk. Not sure if the same thing is for Linux?

2. 100 Linux servers which are part of production, doesn't have access to internet. It's in private DMZ. YUM will not work here. How would you install the latest patches?

3. You need to montior the server, you have no access to any monitoring program, you need to write some thing on your own and export this to excel and show this as a graph? How would you do it?

I answered but want not sure if I answer them correctly. Can you guys help me answer the above questions? Thanks.

1) I am guessing he was looking for rpm(redhat package manager). kind of a weird way to word the question though.

2) you should tell the guy he is wrong. you can use yum on an intranet. you setup your own repo and configured the servers to pull down packages from there. short of that you need to get the files into the DMZ somehow -- maybe DVD, tape, etc... you could copy the files locally and install them if needed.

3) parse output from vmstat/iostat to a .csv file.

What about "pkgconfig"? There is a whole set of commands which begin with "pkg" which are related to building and communicating packages. Off the top of my head, some of the best examples I've seen of this are in OpenBSD tutorials. [Yes, pkg+____ kinds of commands are available in Unix.]

What about "install"? Again, not a Red Hat specific command, but it's Unix/Linux.