Yet Another Interview Question

Another question I like to ask sysadmin candidates in my interviews is, “Describe to me the Linux boot procecess?”

While it’s still something a little fuzzy in my mind, it gives me a quick idea on where that candidate stands on several levels:

• What distros does this candidate know and prefer?
• How deep do they think about things that they might do every day routinely?
• How well can they describe things?
• Do they change their mind once I correct them with a “fact” that is obviously wrong?
• What areas are they most comfortable talking about here? e.g. BIOS, hard drive boot sector, kernel boot, system init, start up scripts, etc?
• How easily can they possibly repair a crashed system?