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It is easy to find typical interview questions for sysadmins and network engineers, but when I search for hardware engineer (hardware operations engineer) I can't even find one site with typical interview questions.

Question

What would be typical questions for ask for a hardware Ops position?

What is the person suppose to know for such a job in a Linux dominated data centre?

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    By "hardware operations engineer" do you mean somebody who works with equipment at a data center? Oct 23, 2014 at 23:45
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    What are the job duties of the Hardware Operations Engineer?
    – freiheit
    Oct 23, 2014 at 23:45
  • @MarkWagner Yes exactly. Oct 23, 2014 at 23:47
  • @freiheit Duties would be troubleshooting hardware and network issues, replace failed hardware parts, setting up routers, switches, bridges, and cabling. Oct 23, 2014 at 23:50
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    I think that a good engineer should at least know as much as this user.
    – ewwhite
    Oct 24, 2014 at 3:42

1 Answer 1

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How hardcore do you want your employee to be? If you want someone with some serious neck-beard credentials, I'd be asking about low level stuff like explaining how IRQ sharing works, or how the CPU scheduler works in NUMA architecture. Throw in some questions about TCP offloading or something similarly obscure like that.

If you're not after someone with such hardcore credentials, you can probably start with getting them to explain the differences between SAS and SATA (i.e. almost everything), or test their knowledge with some oldschool SCSI questions, like explaining what LVD is, or get them to identify the difference between PCI-E and PCI-X.

If they are going to be spending money or designing racks or networks, you might want to test their experience at this by asking if they have an estimate of the per-port costs for a 10GbE or 8Gb FC network. How much throughput do you get per-stream to an LACP or Etherchannel trunk?

For network design, ask them questions about OSPF and BGP. Ask them if there's ever a suitable scenario to use RIP. Which VLANs should you avoid using to keep compatibility with older equipment? What is 802.1QinQ?

Hardware is a large field - as large as programming perhaps, but with not nearly as many people in the field to write excellent interview questions like there are for programmers.

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    @JasmineLognnes I think asking when to choose FC or when to choose iSCSI or when to choose a converged network is appropriate. Perhaps ask them some questions like what they expect the cost-per-port is for a 10GbE ethernet network or an 8Gb FC network. That might test their experience at purchasing existing equipment, as anyone who has been involved in expensive networks would have a good idea of the per-port cost. Oct 23, 2014 at 23:49
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    @JasmineLognnes yes, RAID choice is an important one. Also good to test their knowledge of SSDs and RAID controllers. When it comes to SSD, not all RAID controllers are equal. Oct 24, 2014 at 0:17
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    ask them what they would do with a raid 5 in which two drives failed, within a day of each other. Both drives are still usable, and will not be replaced
    – dyasny
    Oct 24, 2014 at 1:24
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    It's a well known procedure called retagging. With two failed disks, you can't backup the data, but you can look at the logs, find out which drive failed first, and build a new array, focing the first failed disk offline. Always a good chance to get accessible data in a degraded array - good enough to slavage what needs to be salvaged
    – dyasny
    Oct 25, 2014 at 13:23
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    usually drives that get kicked out of an array, while remaining usable have bad firmware (or the controller does). bad blocks get relocated until there is no more room to relocate, and then the drive becomes physically faulty. bad firmware often causes scsi timeouts, which in turn cause the disk to fail to respond in an array, and get marked as faulty
    – dyasny
    Oct 25, 2014 at 21:19

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