Technical IT Interview Questions

Interviewing for any job can be a daunting prospect, interviewing for an IT job usually entails a two stage process.  One where the hiring company and you get a chance to get to know each other and what you can offer each other.  And the second part is the technical stage, where the hiring company grill you about what technologies, terminologies and concepts you understand. If you are IT generalist and have a broad set of skills it can be hard to anticipate where the hiring company might question you and can cause a lot of nerves to kick in.  Over the years I have taken a note of the questions that I've been asked and refer back to them before I go for an interview.  This list has grown over the years, and I thought it would be worth sharing some of those questions with my readers.  I've broken the questions into various sections.  Hopefully you will find it advantageous.

General

• Describe RAID 5.
  • Blocks are striped and parity is distributed
  • Requires a minimum of three disks
  • Offers good performance and redundancy
  • Good for heavy read applications
• What is RAID 10?
  • Blocks are mirrored and striped
  • Minimum of four disks are required
  • Excellent performance and redundancy
  • Can be expensive to implement
• What port does SSH use by default?
  • Port 22

Active Directory

• What are FSMO roles?
  • PDC emulator (one per domain) Infrastructure master (one per domain) Relative ID (RID) master (one per domain) Schema master (one per forest) Domain naming master (one per forest)

Powershell

• What is a function versus an advanced function?
  • A function is a list of statements wrapped into a scriptblock.  An advanced function is when the attribute CmdletBinding is used to offer additional functionality to your script.

VMware

• What command would you use to connect to an ESX host within VMware CLI?

  • Connect-Viserver should be used to initiate a connection to your host

• What tool would you use to migrate a VM from one host to another?

  • vMotion

• What tool would you use to ensure that each host within your environment is configured the same?

  • Through vCentre you can use Host Profiles to ensure all your hosts are configured the same.
    Exchange

• What is a DAG?

  • A DAG is a fault tolerance mechanism that can be used to protect your mailbox databases.

• What is a Transport Queue?

  • The transport queue is where messages are temporarily stored until they are passed onto the next stage.

• Can you explain what a copy queue and replay queue is?

  • The copy queue is the where log files wait to be copied and inspected.  The replay queue is where log files wait to be replayed into the database.

• What weight would you give an MX record to ensure that server was the preferred one?

  • The server with the lowest value is the preferred server

Configuration Manager (SCCM)

• Where does collection evaluation happen?
  • Primary Site level
• Do you need to do schema extension when installing SCCM?
  • Yes, you can use the ExtADSch.exe to help extend the schema
• What is CMTrace?
  • CMTrace is a log viewer available for download from the System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager Toolkit
• What happens when your merge log files using CMTrace?
  • You can see events from several logs file in one view
• What is the maximum number of distribution points?
  • 250 per site within SCCM 2012 R2, plus up to 2000 pull distribution point.
• Can you have multiple client settings?
  • Yes, you can.  In order to ensure some take priority over others you weight them similar to MX Records
• What is CMEval?
  • The CMEval tool runs as a scheduled task on each client computer randomly and performs remediation tasks on any failed checks.

Conclusion

Of course this only covers a small variety of the topics that a technical IT interview could cover, but it hopefully gives you a starting point to start doing your research and can help to uncover any areas you might be weak in. Remember sometimes you don't always have to provide an answer to the question your being asked, sometimes the hiring team are more concerned about how you would go about finding the answer out than knowing everything.  Also if your struggling to explain the term in words, ask if you can use a whiteboard in the room to draw the answer.  We can all get tongue tied and nervous within an technical IT interview situation, imparting the knowledge that you have verbally or pictorially is usually acceptable.