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To a certain extent the answers here will be similar to System Administrator interview questions and answers and What are your best senior level Linux interview questions since most any good linux admin would need to know their way around Apache.

However, I'm not hiring a senior linux admin, I'm hiring a firm to secure our web servers, to optimize their performance and decrease both the risk of failure as well as the consequences of same. Being able to walk me through the entire Linux boot process as suggested in one of the responses above seems overkill.

I wonder whether one might choose to ask different questions of an interviewee if he or she is exclusively adminning a few Linux web servers rather than performing deeply complicated configuration of Linux.

Perhaps I'm betraying my ignorance here - please forgive if so!

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possible duplicate of What are your best senior level Linux interview questions – ErikA Aug 3 '11 at 21:20
Instead of interviewing them, maybe you should be asking for a list of references. – Zoredache Aug 3 '11 at 22:10
"most any good linux admin would need to know their way around Apache" -- and it just goes downhill from there. How do you differentiate between "deeply complicated configuration" and "adminning a few Linux web servers"? Properly executing the latter will likely involve the former. – womble Aug 3 '11 at 22:22
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closed as off topic by Zoredache, ErikA, Shane Madden, Iain♦, DJ Pon3 Aug 3 '11 at 21:58

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Asking how (and if?) their people are certified seems like a pretty good start.

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And the questioner only gets points if they laugh in your face and say, "those certifications are worthless". – womble Aug 3 '11 at 22:23
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I don't think it's overkill to go through the boot process . The boot process is not that long and if these people are 'securing, optimizing performance, and reducing risk' , then I think they should be able to tell you how the system starts up . It's really not that hard . How can they say Apache won't fail if they don't know what they're looking at when they look under the hood ?

If their specialty is Apache httpd, then I honestly don't think it's too much to ask them to build an Apache configuration file by hand from scratch ( 0 bytes ) after they've told you how Linux starts up . Barring that, you might print /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf without the comments and ask them what this that and the other lines specifically do . What do these modules do that are being loaded ?

You can use this command to strip the comments out of httpd.conf . The 'grep' invocation will also strip other style comments out, so you should make a note of it .

grep -vE "(^#|^\;|^$|^\s+#)" /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

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