Week 1 - What is Systems Administration?

Question 1

What does IT infrastructure encompass? (4)

Answer 1

1. Software
2. Hardware
3. Network
4. Services

all required for an organization to operate in an enterprise IT environment

Question 2

What are the 3 most common form factors for servers?

medieval, oven, wesley snipes

Answer 2

1. Tower server (sit upright)
2. Rack server (lay flat)
3. Blade server (slimmer than rack servers)

Question 3

What is a KVM switch? What does a KVM switch allow you to do?

connect… control…one

Answer 3

Stands for keyboard, video, and mouse

It allows you to connect to multiple computers using a single keyboard, mouse, and monitor

Question 4

How do you define a data center?

Answer 4

A facility that stores hundreds or thousands of servers

Question 5

What are “clients”?

Answer 5

Clients request the service provided by a server

Question 6

What are 3 things an internet service handles for you in terms of datacenters?

police, down, hostess

Answer 6

1. Security
2. Updates
3. Server Hardware

Question 7

What’s a good way to cover your bases when it comes to your company using the cloud to store data?

Answer 7

Back up critical data in the cloud and on a physical disk

Question 8

What are the 4 main stages of a hardware lifecycle?

pro, dep, mai, ret

Answer 8

1. Procurement - purchase hardware or re-use hardware for an employee
2. Deployment - hardware is set up so employee can do their job
3. Maintenance - stage where software is updated and any hardware issues are fixed
4. Retirement - final stage where hardware becomes unusable, no longer needed and must be removed from computer fleet

Question 9

What does it mean to batch update?

Answer 9

Once every month or so you update the servers with the latest security patches and critical system updates so you don’t waste time updating as soon as updates come in

Question 10

What’s the command in Linux that allows us to record a group of commands as they’re being issued along with their output?

Answer 10

script

Question 11

As an admin, it’s crucial to ______ what you did to repeat the same process in the future and fix any issues

Answer 11

document

Question 12

What’s a good way to “think before you type”?

Answer 12

Write out the steps you plan to take before you do them

(helps to plan ahead and serves as documentation)

Question 13

What’s the Windows equivalent of Linux’s script command?

Answer 13

Start-Transcript

Question 14

What other tools can we can use to record an interaction with an application besides Linux command script and Windows command Start-Transcript? (3)

record, o, v

Answer 14

1. Record My Desktop tool (Linux)
2. OBS
3. VLC

Question 15

What are 3 steps you can take to make sure you can quickly revert to a previous state in case something goes wrong (rollback)?

make a , keeping your config…, documenting what steps…

Answer 15

1. Make a copy of the state before changing it
2. Keeping your configuration in a version control system
3. Documenting what steps you need to take in order to go back to the previous state

Question 16

What is IT change management?

process for making

Answer 16

standardized process for making technical changes to information systems

Question 17

What is production?

Answer 17

Production is parts of the infrastructure that is actively running and being accessed by users

Question 18

If making important changes you should always run them through a test environment first. What is a test environment?

Answer 18

A test environment has the same configuration as the production environment machine(s) but isn’t actively being accessed by users

Question 19

It’s recommended to use a secondary machine if you’re in charge of an important service that needs to keep running. What is a secondary or stand-by machine?

Answer 19

It’s a machine that’s the same as a production machine but won’t receive any traffic from users until you enable it to

Question 20

What are canaries?

Answer 20

Canaries are a small group of servers that detect any potential issues in the larger changes you want to push out

Question 21

What are 2 questions to ask when assessing risk for applying changes (to determine how much time to spend with test environments, secondary machines, etc)

How important…. , how many users…

Answer 21

1. How important is the service to the infrastructure?
2. How any users would be impacted if the service went down?

Question 22

What are 3 questions to ask in a reproduction case before you start trying to fix the issue?

What steps, What’s the, What’s the

Answer 22

1. What steps did you take to get to this point?
2. What’s the unexpected (bad) result?
3. What’s the expected result?

Question 23

Before you start fixing something, make sure you can _____ it so you can test the solution later to make sure it’s fixed

Answer 23

recreate

Question 24

What are infrastructure services?

Answer 24

they are what allow an organization to function (connecting to network, setting up network hardware, connecting computers to an internal network, etc)

hardware, software, file sharing services, org’s website, etc