Redhat Enterprise Linux Interview Questions

Basic Level Questions - Important for General Knowledge

1) What is Linux

2) What is Kernel

3) Difference between Windows & Linux

4) What is GNU

5) Advantages of Open Source

6) 5 Open Source softwares

7) What is Vi ?

8) Difference between 32 Bit & 64 Bit Architecture

9) Difference between Linux & Unix

10) What is Bash

11) What is Grub

12) What are the symbolic links

13) How hard link works

14) What is file system

15) Types of filesystem in linux

16) Difference between Windows FAT File system and ext3

17) What is journalism

18) How do you change permissions in Linux

19) Difference between primary & secondary groups

20) What is mounting in linux

22) In Linux everything is File – Explain ?

23) What is Daemon

24) What are the shell environmental variables

25) What is redirection

26) Explain the use of grep command

27) Importance of system logs in any operating system

28) Importance of /etc directory

29) Use of shadow file

30) Explain the use of pipe operators ?

31) What is shebang in scripting

33) Is scripting a programming language ?

34) Use of Sed

35) Use of Awk

36) Explain /proc

37) What is GCC in Linux

38) What is sigterm ?

39) nice and renice

40) System calls

41) Posix

42) Difference between ext2 & ext3 filesystem

43) Use of fstab file

44) What is Swap

45) Explain the use of LVM

46) What is RAID ? Types of Raid

48) How kickstart works

49) Explain Kerberos

50) What is yum

51) Why is DNF better than yum

51) Why we use system tuning

52) What is docker file

53) What do you think, which is better - Physical Hosting, Cloud Hosting or hosting in a container

54) Difference between podman and docker

55) What is cockpit

56) Why do we configure proxy on nginx

57) What is port forwarding

58) Difference between initd & systemd

59) Advantages of using systemd

60) Connection between systemd & containers

Interview Questions for 1 Year Experienced Candidate

1. Boot Process of Linux ( Please also include grub stages grub 1 , grub 1.5 and grub2)

2. What is kernel and how kernel interacts with the system.

3. What is DNS? (Explain in detail including records and port)

4. What is LVM?

5. Suppose 1 file is drastically filling the filesystem space then how would u identify which file is
increasing the file system space?

6. U r on a remote location then how would u troubleshoot the network.

8. find out Top 5 processes in Linux which have more cpu and memory consumption.

9. What is load average and how would you check it?

10. What is a context switch and how do you check the context switch ?

11. PID of Scheduler?

13. Suppose u have a working LVm and now u have received new hardware and you have to
migrate the LVM from old hardware to new hardware then how would you migrate it.?

14. Difference between nfsv3 and nfsv4

15. nfs3 is stateless or stateful.

16. What is the zombie process and orphan process?

17. How would you find the inactive process in the Linux System?

18. Types of Shell in Linux and Advantage of Bash Shell over other shell?

19. What is superblock?

20. What is inode?

21. If inode table is full then how would you make space ?

22. When you do ls -la on any directory you find (.) and (..) what does it mean?

23. kernel Patching . How will you upgrade the kernel ? If suppose your new kernel installed and
when you reboot the server and kernel panic occurs how will you rectify this situation?

24. You have a new kernel installed and now you want to remove the old kernel how will you
remove it ?

25. If your passwd file is accidentally deleted then how will you recover it ?

26. Currently you are having /etc/shadow file for storing password and now i want to store
password in /etc/passwd file, then what will be the procedure to store password in passwd file?

27. What is root DNS and rndc port?

28. Difference between authoritative, recursive and caching only dns?

29. How can turn a container into a services

30. How can you make journald logs persistent.

1. What is Aliasing in a system?

2. Ext3 , Ext2 , Ext4 ? What is Journalism ? What are its advantages ?

3. What is Super Block ? What does First sector of the hard disk contain ?

4. Why is the 8e Type needed ? Which type of filesystem in Linux can not be reduced under

LVM ?

5. Can we use the whole hard disk in LVM without partitioning ? What are the factors

affecting PE size in LVM ?

6. How many maximum partitions are possible ? Why 4 primary partitions ? What is the

type of extended partition ?

7. Difference between primary and extended partitions ? What is size of Filesystem

table ? Where does this file system table exist on the hard disk ? Are MBR and file

system tables different things ?

8. Why is Tar utility still used ? What are its advantages ?

9. At the time of installation /boot is created on a standard partition or we can create it on

LVM / Raid ?

10. What is Inode ? What is used for Address mapping in File system table i.e. Inode or

absolute path ?

11. Explain Packet Transmission between various Layers over the network, with the

example - if you want to open google.com on your system.

12. Is Directory a file ? If yes then what type of data is stored in a directory file.

13. We use defaults in fstab, what does that mean ?

14. What is ACL ? Does acl use any file system mounting option to work or not ?
15. what is lsattr, chattr

16. Describe the installation of RPM ? And what's running in the background in

RPM packages ? What scripts are running if I initiate RPM installation ? RPM --

scripts

17. What is RPMDB ? How does it help in restoring default permissions of file ?

18. What are ulimits ? What is the job of nice command ?

19. What is the actual use of touch commands ?

20. Now Scripting in details from shebang, interpreter, operators, redirection use to if

condition, case

21. Difference between shell and bash

22. What are environmental variables and how can you change them persistently ?

23. What is the use of the skel directory ?

24. What is ps ?

25. Explain Quota in detail ?

26. What is RAID ? Difference between software Raid & Hardware RAID ?

What is RAID Array ? Difference between all types of RAID ?

27. What is IPv6 ? What's new in it ?

28. Difference between Token Ring & Ethernet

29. Difference between DOD Model & OSI Model ? What are

the reasons for not implementing the OSI model till date

30. What is TTL ?

31. What is Hop count ?

32. Difference between Routing Protocol & Routed Protocol ? With the examples of both
33. What do you suggest: Static Routing is better or Dynamic routing is better ?

34. What are the limitations of Static Routing ?

35. What is Collision Domain ?

36. What is Broadcast Domain ?

37. Difference between switch and hub ?

38. What is Bridge ?

39. Explain Router ?

40. Use of a switching table ?

41. What is the use of whois ?

42. Explain ARP. RARP, MAC, Layer 2 protocols, Layer 3 Protocols ?

43. What is a DHCP server ? What are DHCP

leases ? By which command i can obtain

dynamic ip in linux ?

44. Difference between ftp & tftp

45. Explain all ports used by commonly used services ?

46. What is NameSpace in kernel

47. define sql

48. What is the difference between file system

data management and database

management system ?

49. Which port is used by the mail server ? What

is the Relay host in Mail server ? and What is

an open relay ?

50. What is Masquerade ? Explain various chains in Iptables ?

52. What is a TCP wrapper ? How does it work ? Does it work above the firewall or below ?

53. What is SELinux ? Explain in full detail ? Minimum 300 Words ?

54. What is PAM

55. What is the use of initrd along with kernel in grub ?

56. Difference between init and systemd

57. Explain the advantages of ssl over plain data transmission ?

58. What is Metadata

59. What is memcached

60. what is kdump

61. What is Cert monger

62. What is udev

63. Explain the use of /proc

64. Full use of sysctl.conf

65. what is dmesg

66. Where is log related to security stored, where is

general log and where is selinux related logs

stored ?

67. What is logrotate

68. What is Kerberos

69. What is the use of sssd services

70. Which encryption method is used to store passwords in a shadow file ?

71. What is regex ?

72. What is SSH tunneling ?

74. Which command is used to delete data permanently which is not at all recoverable ?

75. difference between port labeling and port forwarding

76. What is the use of caching nameserver

77. Difference between NAS and SAN

78. What is GNUpg

79. Difference between Block Level Access | File level access | object level access

80. Which utility is used to analyze the data in the network ?

Which utility is used to scan the open ports of a machine ?

81. Explain the full use of PING Command ?

82. Which utility is used to sniff the data from the network ?

83. Difference between IP Bonding & Link Aggregation ?

84. What is nautilus ? What is Anaconda

85. Process Handling & Process Monitoring ?

86. What is RHN ? How can we connect to it ?

87. What is KVM & Qemu ? Guest Machines ?

88. Difference between Openstack, Vmware & KVM ?

89. Difference between grub & Grub2

90. Explain SUID, SGID and Sticky bit

91. How does kickstart work ?

92. Difference between LDAP & LDAP with kerberos

93. How do we pass the boot parameter in the kernel at the time of booting ?

94. What is Rescue mode ? Difference between emergency mode and single user mode

?
95. What is journalctl ?

96. Explain Booting Process

97. Use of build & make command

98. Use of /etc/hosts file

99. How can you administrate machines remotely ? Which one is good method

100. What is netfilter ?

101. Why is modprobe used ?

102. Difference between gdisk and fdisk ?

103. What is UEFI bios

104. What is RPC, IPC

105. Difference between PE & LE

106. why we use partprobe & kpart