UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi everyone,,

I am new to the forum...but not to Unix.
I have gathered few questions from my mates who attended interviews in various companies as I have to attend one on dec 3rd for Sys admin position. Please respond with the answers you know and also help with various other interview questions that you have faced. They told me that the interviewers are mostly asking scenario type of questions. Also need suggestions for the interview.

Below are the questions

How much time it took to backup 2.5tb of data
What are the minimum services to be installed on a new server
Can you explain any difficult situation when you wrote shell script and write the script
Explain the setup of VMware ESX and also Xen
What security errors you faced while dealing with Tomcat/Apache or in general
What is the biggest error you faced in Backups
What are issues you encountered (daily issues) with Apache/Tomcat
What is the difficult issue you solved in Apache/Tomcat
What would you do if server goes down? How much time you take to make the server up? What procedure you follow?
What is the biggest problem you solved in your experience?
How you configure apache in a cluster with high availability?
What is web2.0? Can u explain clearly?

What are the advantages of using links?
How you trouble shoot your Solaris/Linux Server. Write the steps
Difference between Solaris and Redhat Linux
What command would you use to get the overall performance of the system in solaris & Linux?
what command do u use to start Oracle enterprise manager

What do you mean by controller? Can you show how it will look like?
What would you do if a disk in the disk array fails? Which command would you use?
Through which command would you check on the server
(i) What updates / applications that were installed on the client systems in the last 15 days?
(ii) Which command you use on server to check all the processes running on client systems?
(iii) What would you do initially if all the WIN 7 machines in the office are running slow with very bad performance? Tell the steps?
How do you check which listener is running on the database server?
What is the biggest challenge u faced in unix environment?

From what, to what? Too vague to give a good answer, maybe on the order of many hours to several days. But this depends on the hardware. Too vague. Depends what the server is, what's installed on it, and what it's for. No, I won't let you recount my job experiences in your job interview. Too vague. That's your job. If you haven't had any experience with these things, don't lie. Too vague. First thing I'd do is figure out what they mean by "goes down" -- I've had people describe anything from "slow" to "stolen" as "down" -- and see if the server still responds in any way and proceed from there. How long it takes to fix depends entirely on what the problem is. If you have no experience with these things, don't lie. Too vague. "overall performance"? Maybe 'top'. But the question is extremely vague, they may have wanted something else. google can tell you. so mind-bogglingly vague that I'm not sure even they know what they want. vague, vague, vague. what kind of array? what system? Depends entirely what their setup is... This seems to be another Oracle thing. Well, what is it?

Depends of your backup software, configuration, architecture and what you are backuping
(1 big monolithic server with 2.5 TB or 2500 servers over LAN/WAN totalizing 2.5 TB...)
for what usage?
Not having one maybe?...
First question: are we talking of hardware issue? I rarely see unix server (real ones that is) go down for other reasons and so very vague and obscure...
Drive the TSM team mad?
Ooh time to leave... Im in one the these moods againn...