Troubleshooting Questions

Definition

Scenario-based questions testing a candidate's ability to logically isolate and fix broken systems under pressure.

Explain Like I'm New

The 'Everything is broken, fix it' test.

Real World Example

Interview Question: 'A user complains the website is down. Walk me through exactly what commands you run, in order, to figure out why.'

Common Use Cases

•DevOps interviews
•System Admin interviews

Interview Questions

basic

You type a command and get 'Permission Denied'. What is the easiest way to quickly run the exact same command with admin rights without retyping it?

intermediate

A server is completely out of disk space, but `df -h` says there is 50GB free. What is the likely cause?

Flash Cards

Question

Rerun with sudo?

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Answer

Type `sudo !!`. The `!!` tells the shell to insert the previous command.

Question

Out of space but df shows free space?

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Answer

The server has run out of Inodes. Millions of tiny files have consumed all the index cards, even though the physical disk isn't full. You verify this with `df -i`.