Chapter 7 - Administering the System

Question 1

in linux, accounts are what?

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Answer 1

data structures and procedures used to identify individual users of a computer

Question 2

group membership is controlled through which file?

each user has a default or ____ group, which is set in the user’s configuration ____ record

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Answer 2

/etc/group

primary, /etc/passwd

Question 3

linux tracks users and groups by numers, not by names. what are these numbers?

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Answer 3

user ID

group ID

Question 4

how many user accounts can be made on a linux machine?

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Answer 4

upper limit is beyond 4.2 billion

Question 5

what utility do you use to add users?

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Answer 5

useradd

Question 6

are passwords in linux hashed or encrypted?

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Answer 6

hashed

Question 7

what’s the command for setting the password?

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Answer 7

passwd

Question 8

as the administrator, how do you enter a new password for a user?

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Answer 8

passwd username

Question 9

the usermod has some utilities to it. i will list them, you tell me what they do.

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Answer 9

m - move the user’s file to a new location
d - changes the user’s home directory
l - changes the user’s login name to the specified field
L and U - lock and unlock the user’s password

Question 10

what command allows you to modify an account’s expiration?

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Answer 10

chage

Question 11

how do you remove a user and all their stuff?

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Answer 11

userdel -r username

Question 12

how do you add a group?

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Answer 12

groupadd

Question 13

what command modifies an existing group’s settings?

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Answer 13

groupmod

Question 14

true/false: group passwords are common and not considered a security risk.

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Answer 14

false

Question 15

what does the grep command allow you to do?

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Answer 15

to search through files for particular records

Question 16

text mode user environments are controlled through what?

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Answer 16

shell configuration files

Question 17

when you are adding users, useradd copies files from the ____ directory into a newly created home directory

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Answer 17

skeleton

Question 18

how do you change the log file configuration?

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Answer 18

by configuring the syslogd daemon

Question 19

what do you use to manually create a log entry (or have a script do so)?

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Answer 19

logger

Question 20

what do log file rotation tools do?

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Answer 20

they rename and optionally compress the current log files, delete old log files, and force the logging system to begin using new log files

Question 21

what command is used for rotating the log files?

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Answer 21

logrotate

Question 22

what does the systemd-journald daemon do?

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Answer 22

its a system service that brings together and stores logging data

Question 23

how does MaxFileSec determine the rotation schedule?

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Answer 23

uses a time increment

Question 24

what is the basic journalctl syntax?

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Answer 24

journalctl [options…] [matches…]

Question 25

there are 2 built-in clocks. tell me what they are.

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Answer 25

the hardware clock

the software clock

Question 26

what happens if the NTP daemon is running when you issue the ntpd -gq command?

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Answer 26

you will get no warning message or error message, just a prompt back with no time synchronization completed

Question 27

what is the cron tool responsible for?

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Answer 27

used for scheduling tasks to run at specified times (cron jobs)

Question 28

tell me about the 2 types of cron jobs

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Answer 28

system cron jobs - run as root and perform system-wide maintenance tasks
user cron jobs - run user programs on a regular basis

Question 29

true/false: cron jobs run unsupervised. therefore, if a program requires user input, it cannot be a cron job.

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Answer 29

true

Question 30

what utility do you use to create a cron job?

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Answer 30

crontab

Question 31

what is the default editor when you use the crontab -e command?

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Answer 31

the vi editor

Question 32

the anacron utility is controlled through a config file called /etc/anacrontab. this file consists of 3 main line types. tell me what they are.

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Answer 32

comment lines denoted by a leading hash mark
environment variable assignments
job definition records