CISA 1240: Linux Administration Midterm Exam Review Workbook 1: RHEL Installation 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

What is the name of the RHEL installer? anaconda Describe the purpose of each of the two stages of Anaconda. stage 1 collects enough info to find, load, and execute the second stage installer Stage 2 installs redhat How can Anaconda stage 1 be accessed? cd, boot.iso, usb, PXE environment How can Anaconda stage 2 be accessed? installation dvd, HTTP, FTP, NFS, ISO on a local connected HDD List the contents of the root directory of the installation DVD. Give two ways downloading the RHEL distribution. through the redhat customer portal or using curl C O URL How can you verify the integrity of a downloaded RHEL ISO image? md5sum How can you burn a RHEL ISO image to a CD? cdrecord What does the Anaconda boot prompt look like?

10. List some common Anaconda boottime parameters and explain their function. askmethod=ask method for accessing second stage installer 11. Ks=params= use kickstart to perform a scripted installation 12. What are two ways of generating to perform a Kickstart installation. 13. List the various sections of a Kickstart script. 14. How do you deliver a Kickstart script to Anaconda? using ks= 15. What is the name of the GUI that we installed in class to generate a Kickstart script? system-config-kickstart 16. What can you use to check the syntax of a Kickstart script? ksvalidator Workbook 2: Hardware and Device Configuration 1. 2. 3. 4. What is a device driver? What is a static kernel image? What is the name of the static kernel image? How can you determine which command line was used to boot the current instance of the kernel? What is a kernel module? Where are kernel modules stored in the filesystem? What command generates a list of currently loaded kernel modules?

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How can parameters be passed to modular device drivers as they are loaded? What does the dmesg buffer contain?

10. What command outputs the current contents of the dmesg buffer? 11. Where can a snapshot of the dmesg buffer be found? 12. What does the kudzu utility do? 13. What is the absolute reference of the file that contains a dynamic database of currently detected hardware? 14. Give a command line that can be used to monitor hardware changed dynamically. 15. What is the /proc filesystem? 16. Does Linux support SMP? 17. What is the absolute reference of the file that reports information about detected CPUs? 18. What is the absolute reference of the file that provides statistics about the amount of detected memory and current memory utilization? 19. What are the naming conventions for (i) an IDE primary master disk (ii) an IDE primary slave disk (iii) an IDE secondary master disk (iv) an IDE secondary slave disk? 20. In which directory can low level information about a primary master IDE disk be found? 21. How does Linux usually refer to the first detected SCSI or SATA disk? 22. What command lists all attached PCI devices? 23. Give a command line that displays the available IRQ lines and any device drivers which are using them. 24. Give a command line that outputs which ports have been claimed by which device driver. 25. Give a command line that outputs all of the devices whose memory buffers have been mapped into physical memory and the physical memory addresses which have been assigned to each buffer. 26. What happens when a new PCI device is recognized by the HAL but an appropriate device driver is not already present in the kernel? 27. What is the purpose of the lspci commands v switch? 28. How do processes communicate with device drivers?

29. What are files which reference device drivers referred to as? 30. In which directory are device nodes found? 31. Give an example of a (i) block device (ii) character device. 32. In a long listing, what character is used to identify a (i) block device node (ii) character device node? 33. What information, if any, is stored in a device node? 34. Explain the purpose of the major number of a filesystem device node. 35. What three parameters are used to associate a device node to a particular device driver? 36. Give a command line to create a device node named mytty4 that can be used to output data to the fourth virtual console. 37. What is special about /dev/cdrom? 38. Give a command line to backup the MBR of the primary master IDE disk. 39. Which command returns how long a machine has been operating without powering down or rebooting? 40. Explain the meaning of the three load averages output by the uptime command. 41. Which command gives a dynamic output of processes running on a machine? 42. By default, how often is the top commands output refreshed? 43. Refer to the contents of /proc/meminfo at the bottom of page 44. Explain the significance of the buffers value and the cached value. 44. Refer to the top commands output in the middle of page 45. Explain the significance of the four values in the Mem: line and the last value in the Swap: line.

Workbook 3: Linux Filesystem Management 45. How does the Linux kernel refer to the 7 partition on the drive /dev/sdc? 46. What two items does the MBR contain and how large is the MBR? 47. What is a bootloaders function? 48. For how many partitions can the partition table store information? 49. How many primary partitions can each disk be divided into? 50. What is the function of an extended partition? 51. What is a logical partition? 52. How does Linux always begin counting the first logical partition? 53. Give a command line that lists all known partitions on a disk. 54. What is the partition ID for a Linux ext2 or ext3 filesystem? 55. What is the partition ID for a Linux swap partition? 56. Give a command line to edit a disks partition table. 57. Give two ways to force a Linux kernel to reread a disks partition table. 58. Which proc filesystem lists all known partitions? 59. What is Linuxs native filesystem? 60. What is the primary difference between (i) the ext2 and ext3 filesystems and (ii) the ext4 and other ext filesystems? 61. What is the filesystem associated with compact disks? 62. What is the purpose of the nfs filesystem? 63. What is the proc filesystem? 64. Give three equivalent command lines that initialize the /dev/hda6 partition with an ext2 filesystem. 65. In Linux, what is equivalent to a volume label in the Windows operating system? 66. What block sizes does the mke2fs command choose by default? 67. Give two situations where you should directly specify the number of inodes when creating a filesystem.
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68. By default, how much space on a disk does the ext2 filesystem reserve for the root user? 69. What is the purpose of the needs_recovery flag? 70. What are the three steps taken by a journaling filesystem when writing information to a disk? 71. Give four equivalent command lines that initialize the /dev/hda6 partition with an ext3 filesystem. 73. What is a mount point? 74. What is the first mount performed directly by the kernel at startup? 75. Give the command line that creates the scenario depicted in Figures 3-4 and 3-5, where the /dev/hda6 filesystem is mounted to /home. 76. Generally, which user(s) can mount filesystems? 77. Explain the significance of each of the options and arguments on this command line: #mount t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt

77. Give a command line that lists all mounted filesystems. 78. Give two equivalent command lines, each of which unmounts the /dev/hda1 partition from the /home directory. 79. Give two reasons why the command lines in the previous question (assuming that they are correct) would fail. 80. Give two command lines that can help us resolve the problem in the previous question. 81. Assuming that the /dev/hda6 filesystem is mounted to /home, give a command line that remounts the already mounted partition readonly. 82. Write a command line that mounts the /dev/hdb5 partition to the mountpoint /ogg. 83. Examine the fstab file in the middle of page 48. Explain the role of each of the six fields shown. 84. Explain the purpose of the three relevant values for field 6 in the fstab file. 85. When would you use the (no)auto mount option? 86. When would you use the user mount option? 87. Give two situations that can lead to devices shifting identities.

88. Give three reasons why you might add a line to /etc/fstab. 89. What is the purpose of using swap space? 90. What two things could be allocated (that is, used) as swap space? 91. Which proc filesystem lists currently active swap spaces, their types, their sizes, and their priority? 92. Which proc filesystem lists the total amount of currently allocated swap space? 93. Give the command line that initializes /dev/sda1 as swap space. 94. Give the command line that activates the swap space that you initialized in the previous question. 95. Give the command line that deactivates the swap space that you activated in the previous question. 96. What is the purpose of the swapon commands p switch? 97. What does the following command line do? #swapon a

98. Give the command line that displays the volume name of an ext3 filesystem named /dev/hda1. 98. Give the command line that sets the volume name of the /dev/hda1 filesystem to foo. 99. 100. Why might you need to use the fsck command? Which command is used to perform a file system check on an ext3 filesystem?

101. The /lost+found directory contains lost files found by fsck. What does it mean for a file to be lost? 102. During startup, fsck operates differently on an ext2 filesystem versus an ext3 filesystem. Explain the difference. 104. Write the command line to convert the ext2 filesystem named /dev/hda6 into an ext3 filesystem. 105. List the five steps required in order to make use of a new disk that is added to an existing system.

Chapter 7: Logical Volume Management 106. What is the purpose of logical volume management? 107. LVM treats disks as three separate layers. What are they? 108. What is a physical volume? 109. What is a volume group?

110. How is a volume group represented? 111. What happens to the space in a physical volume when it joins a volume group? 112. What is a logical volume? 113. How is a logical volume referenced? 114. Which filesystem(s) can be resized on logical volumes? 115. How do you resize a logical volume? 116. How do you resize a volume group? Workbook 4: System Initialization and Services 1. List the four initialization stages that a Linux system passes through from the time that the power is switched on until users are able to log in. List the four functions that a systems BIOS generally performs. List the three tasks usually performed by the bootloader. What is an initrd (initial ramdisk)? Describe the two stages of a boot loader. In which directory are the various components of the GRUB bootloader found? What are the names of the stage1 bootloader and the stage2 bootloader? Which is the user serviceable part of GRUB? What is the name of the symbolic link that points to the GRUB configuration file?

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10. Explain the function of each of the following lines found in the global section of /boot/grub/grub.conf a. default=0 b. timeout=5 c. password --md5 $2$MrXSq0xS$0LXqkBTfpywyD3TVCao3d0

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title Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server

11. Examine the contents of grub.conf shown on page 10 and explain exactly where the splash screen image file is stored on disk. 12. Examine the GRUB file references in table 2-2 and give the Linux equivalents. 13. In the GRUB menuitem configuration section, what is the function of each of these keywords: root, kernel, and initrd ? 14. Which command generates encrypted passwords which can then be pasted into the GRUB configuration file? 15. Given an encrypted password generated by the command in the previous question, what line would you add to a GRUB configuration file to use this encrypted password? 16. From a system administrators perspective, what are the three steps that a kernel performs during initialization? 17. Explain the significance of the first four kernel boot parameters in table 2-6 on page 17. 18. What is the name of the first process started by the Linux kernel? 19. What is the process ID of the process referred to in the previous question? 20. What does the init process spend its lifetime doing? 21. What is the first thing that the init process does? 22. Explain the purpose of runlevels 0, 1, 3, 5, and 6. 23. Which file defines the default runlevel? 24. Which two runlevels should you never make the default? 25. Explain what this section of /etc/inittab does: si::sysinit:/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit l0:0:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc l1:1:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc l2:2:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc l3:3:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc l4:4:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc l5:5:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc 5 0 1 2 3 4

26. Explain what the following line from /etc/inittab does:

2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2

27. Explain what the following line from /etc/inittab does: x:5:respawn:/etc/X11/prefdm -nodaemon

28. Which command outputs a systems current runlevel? 29. Explain this output of the command referred to in the previous question: N 5 30. Give the command line that changes the current runlevel to the runlevel used for rebooting the machine. 31. What command line is used to force the init process to re-read /etc/inittab after you make changes to that file? 32. What does the command line # init 0 do? 33. Give the command line to shutdown the machine 2 hours from now. 34. Each of the scripts in the /etc/rc.d/init.d/ directory can be called with a single argument. What are the four valid arguments? 35. What is the difference between using the restart and the reload arguments? 36. Examine the contents of the /etc/rc.d/rc3.d/ directory shown in the middle of page 37 and explain the naming convention used for the files. 37. Using the service command, give the command line to restart the network service. 38. Using the service command, give the command line to determine whether the nfs service is running or not. 39. Using the service command, give the command line to start the smb service. 40. What is the difference between using the service command with the start and restart commands? 41. What does chkconfig --list output? 42. Give the command line to restore the runlevel states for the smb service to its default settings. 43. How does booting into runlevel 1 help troubleshoot the boot sequence?

44. How can you bypass the /sbin/init process?