I need to come up with a technical hands-on exam for a new sysadmin position in our company as part of our recruitment process. I'm looking for ideas to make an interesting exam to both check the candidates' technical aptitude but also make the job appealing to them. However the exam should only last about 1 to 2 hours so tasks can't be too much time consuming.
For each component in our stack I would like to have 2 parts:
-troubleshooting: all components will be broken to start with so the person will have to fix issues first.
-implementation: once a component is fixed I'll ask to add a feature to or optimize it
Here is our stack and the ideas I have gathered so far:
-ubuntu server 10.04 TLS: create sudo user, limit SSH access to that user, kill some zombie processes, detect rootkits
-Drupal 6 (CMS): I don't think I want to bother a sysadmin with that
-alfresco community 3.4c (data repository): ?
-solr 1.4 (search engine): setup slave replication
-MariaDB 5.1 (database server): recover root password, create database+user via the cli, have script generate many sql queries to measure performance and do some database optimization work
-iptables (firewall): remove rules preventing connectivity with various components, setup a NAT,SNAT
-nagios/munin (monitoring): create a custom plugin
-openldap (user database): recover the root password, fix the database, create new OU from an LDIF import
-apache (web server): setup a site with proxy to access alfresco and solr through SSL
Questions:
Q1: Have you got ideas about interesting things to troubleshoot/implement. Sharing links to already documented problems/solutions would help me with writing the exam.
Q2: What's the best way to record the whole console output (candidates will be working over SSH)?