How to prepare system /Unix internals interviews
Apr 21, 2018
22 Comments
I’ve tried several DevOps/sre opportunities for FANG level companies. All failed in phone interview of system / Unix internals. How to prepare it?
comments
The following resources are not "the basics" so check them out but they won't do you much good if you don't get hands-on beforehand.
Brendan Gregg https://youtu.be/FJW8nGV4jxY
Not so much a learning resource, but http://rachelbythebay.com/w/ has some good war stories, you can read a few to get the general idea on how to troubleshoot, what to watch out for and avoid etc
Filesystems are academic until you're trying to pick the right one for your pictures. SMB and NFS are the same until you have performance issues moving your files around.
And yeah, I guess you could read the Linux source code. But you better be really good at C.
Much more likely, the package has an installation issue. Open it up (unarchive it), check the contents and most importantly check the pre- and post-install scripts that are embedded in it. See where they're going wrong. If you go into kernel land as soon as you have some file not found issue, you're going to take days to solve an issue that can be figured out in 15min at most
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