CS209 Practicum in System Administration Final Exam May 2, 2000

Circle the best answer

1. What is the first thing you should do when a user brings a problem to you? (a) verify the problem

(b) upgrade the program in question

(c) panic

2. Why don’t most people use a Towers of Hanoi tape rotation?

(a) it’s inefficient

(b) it doesn’t scale well

(c) it’s too complicated

3. DNS round-robin (a) associates one name with multiple IP addresses

(b) associates on IP address with multiple names

(c) is a cute little bird

4. The most common way to compromise a UNIX system is via (a) viruses

(b) buffer overflows

(c) Trojan horses

5. Firewalls are commonly constructed from (a) routers

(b) specially configured computers

(c) both

6. After configuring and installing a new software package, the next step should be (a) test it

(b) tell all your users it is ready to be run

(c) read the install documentation

7. Today, the most common approach to improving system performance involves (a) purchasing new hardware

(b) rewriting code with speedups

(c) teaching users to be more efficient

8. Striping (RAID 0) is a redundant form of data storage (a) True

(b) False

9. Simpler administration is an advantage of a Monolithic approach to system design. (a) True

(b) False 10. Script kiddies do mischief with scripts and programs written by others, often without under-

standing the exploit.

(a) True

(b) False

11. In most cases, it is illegal for a company to monitor their employee’s actions while using company equipment.

(a) True

(b) False

12. Denial of Service attacks usually don’t involve breaking into a computer system, but rather disabling it from one or more external sources.

(a) True

(b) False

Short Answer

13. Name an online resource for security information.

14. Name a UNIX program to display current load average.

15. Name an advantage to having multiple disk partitions on a UNIX machine.

16. Matching (5 points)

Incremental A. Striping with interleaved parity.
Differential B. Mirroring

RAID 0 C. Backup all data that has changed since the last backup, be it either Full or Incremental.

RAID 1  D. Striping

RAID 5 E. Backup all data that has changed since the last Full backup.

17. Extra Credit: Give a reason why paper documentation can be more useful then electronic documentation.

18. Extra Extra Credit: Fill in the blank...

You’re just about as useless as to Helen Keller.