System Administrator Interview Questions and Answers

Q. Describe how the DHCP lease is obtained. 

A. It’s a four-step process consisting of (a) IP request, (b) IP offer, © IP selection and (d) acknowledgement.

Q. I can’t seem to access the Internet, don’t have any access to the corporate network and on ipconfig my address is 169.254.*.*. What happened?

A. The 169.254.*.* netmask is assigned to Windows machines running 98/2000/XP if the DHCP server is not available. The name for the technology is APIPA (Automatic Private Internet Protocol Addressing).

Q. We've installed a new Windows-based DHCP server, however, the users do not seem to be getting DHCP leases off of it.

A. The server must be authorized first with the Active Directory.

Q. How can you force the client to give up the DHCP lease if you have access to the client PC? 

A. ipconfig /release

Q. What authentication options do Windows 2000 Servers have for remote clients?

A. PAP, SPAP, CHAP, MS-CHAP and EAP.

Q. What are the networking protocol options for the Windows clients if for some reason you do not want to use TCP/IP? 

 
A. NWLink (Novell), NetBEUI, AppleTalk (Apple).

Q. What is data link layer in the OSI reference model responsible for?

A. Data link layer is located above the physical layer, but below the network layer. Taking raw data bits and packaging them into frames. The network layer will be responsible for addressing the frames, while the physical layer is responsible for retrieving and sending raw data bits.

Q. What is binding order? 

A. The order by which the network protocols are used for client-server communications. The most frequently used protocols should be at the top.

Q. How do cryptography-based keys ensure the validity of data transferred across the network?  
 

A. Each IP packet is assigned a checksum, so if the checksums do not match on both receiving and transmitting ends, the data was modified or corrupted.

Q. Should we deploy IPSEC-based security or certificate-based security?

A. They are really two different technologies. IPSec secures the TCP/IP communication and protects the integrity of the packets. Certificate-based security ensures the validity of authenticated clients and servers.

Q. What is LMHOSTS file? 

A. It’s a file stored on a host machine that is used to resolve NetBIOS to specific IP addresses.

Q. What’s the difference between forward lookup and reverse lookup in DNS? 

A. Forward lookup is name-to-address, the reverse lookup is address-to-name.

Q. How can you recover a file encrypted using EFS? 

A. Use the domain recovery agent.