174 Essential Operations Engineer Interview Questions You Must Master

1. What is operations? What is game operations?

2. In daily work, operations staff often interact with product teams; what does the product team do?

3. Given three hundred servers, how would you manage them?

4. Briefly describe the principles and characteristics of RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5.

5. What are the differences among LVS, Nginx, and HAProxy, and how would you choose among them in practice?

6. What are the differences among Squid, Varnish, and Nginx, and how would you choose among them?

7. What are the differences between Tomcat and Resin, and how would you choose?

8. What is middleware? What is JDK?

9. Explain the meanings of Tomcat ports 8005, 8009, and 8080.

10. What is a CDN?

11. What is gray‑scale (canary) deployment for websites?

12. Briefly describe the DNS domain name resolution process.

13. What is RabbitMQ?

14. Explain the working principle of Keepalived.

15. Describe the three LVS operating modes and their processes.

16. How does InnoDB locate lock issues, and how can MySQL reduce master‑slave replication lag?

17. How to reset the MySQL root password?

18. Compare the advantages and disadvantages of LVS, Nginx, and HAProxy.

19. How to monitor IP access statistics by analyzing Nginx logs and finding the top ten IPs by page views?

20. Use tcpdump to listen on host 192.168.1.1, port 80, and save the output to tcpdump.log.

21. How to forward local port 80 requests to port 8080 on host 192.168.2.1?

22. Briefly describe the principles and characteristics of RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5 (duplicate entry).

23. What is your understanding of the current role of operations engineers and their work?

24. Write a script to determine which IPs in the 192.168.1.0/24 network are online (pingable).

25. Provide a solution or command to keep only the most recent 7 days of Apache access logs in /app/logs due to disk space constraints.

26. How to optimize a Linux system (general suggestions are acceptable)?

27. Write a command to extract the IP address of eth0 using cut (alternatively using awk or sed).

28. Explain the function of a given SecureCRT shortcut command.

29. Schedule a nightly backup at 12 am that archives /var/www/html to /data with a timestamped filename.

30. How to mount a Windows shared directory on Linux?

31. How to view HTTP concurrent request numbers and their TCP connection states?

32. How to use tcpdump to sniff port 80 traffic and identify the top requester?

33. Write a script to list online IPs in the 192.168.1.0/24 network (ping test).

34. Provide a method to clean up old logs or rotate logs for Apache.

35. General steps to troubleshoot a server that fails to boot.

36. How to handle a Linux system infected by a virus?

37. How to deal with a virus file that re‑creates itself after deletion?

38. Explain the TCP/IP seven‑layer model.

39. What does VSZ and RSS represent in the output of ps aux?

40. How to detect and repair /dev/hda5?

41. How to manually install GRUB?

42. How to view the number of files in /var/log?

43. How to view the number of connections per IP on the current system?

44. Generate a 32‑bit random password in a shell.

45. List the top five IPs with the most accesses in Apache's access.log.

46. How to view the contents of a binary file?

47. What is the boot order of a Linux system?

48. Difference between symbolic links and hard links.

49. How to save the current disk partition table.

50. How to copy, paste, delete lines, and perform search‑and‑replace in a text editor.

51. … (additional questions continue as listed in the original source).