Doing a phone interview for a Windows Admin at 3:00 EST, any advice?

[Wolvenreign]

As the topic says.

 

[FAST6191]

Know windows + windows server.

Less of a glib response.
Two main paths I imagine it will go down.
1) They want someone to handle day to day. How do you make a new user on the domain, limited rights for new users, basics of active directory, do you know much of group policy (be it installs or updates*), printers might be a thing...
2) Something a bit more hardcore like a proper head scratcher, imagined failure (primary domain controllers are a thing of the past but "your PDC is down, what do?" was a popular one) or something to trip you up. This may include some powershell discussions, especially as it got more popular in recent versions. If they are really good they will seek to find whether you really get it -- will you go click 500 times or will you develop a macro/do a wildcard replacement/play with regex to solve your problem.

Someone doing 1) might throw a 2) question in there more to see your thought process in solving it than actually solving it.

*an update taking out a program you want for a day or two while it gets updated or you roll back is nothing as a home user, when said update takes out your bespoke accounting software or actual getting stuff done software and the whole place grinds to a halt then guess who gets yelled at? Whether you are led to that, asked it straight or otherwise want to show you consider such things I do not know.

I don't know whether they will throw email/exchange in there -- a lot of SME have gone managed exchange or even, to the amazement of anybody that came up in the 90s and 00s, straight IMAP + whatever calendar or something equally less featured (not that it is a bad thing) than exchange. I would have hoped you would have been told exchange was a thing before now but I have been surprised in the past.
Likewise I don't know whether people would have gone office 365 or what.

If you have a VM you can play along with at home then that is not the worst plan -- I know technet has died but a lot of the interview techniques are of that vintage and thus people could play along.
Speaking of VMs then in almost all cases I would expect people to be running on them, indeed not running on one is an indicator that I am either into something special or something I want to walk away from. If you can handle consumer virtualbox or vmware then that would not be a bad thing.
If you want to be vaguely aware of MS Licensing then do that. Or again show that you are cognisant of it.
I imagine you would anyway but knowing enough networking to get by is also good.

 

[Originality]

Or it may just be a job for logging tickets and resetting passwords. A little company context would give an idea of what they’d expect their admins to do.

That said, they salary they’re offering tends to be the first indicator of if they’re looking for an entry level person or someone who actually knows how to use AD/Exchange/SQL.

 

[Wolvenreign]

It's with The State of Indiana, $37/hour.

Job Requirements

• Three or more years of work experience as a Windows Server systems administrator.

• Experience with virtualization technologies, specifically VMware.

• Experience with Microsoft Exchange/Office 365, Active Directory, DFS, SCCM, Windows Desired State Configuration, and WSUS.

• Installation, support and updates of Windows servers.

• Experience using scripting languages to automate system administration processes, specifically PowerShell.

• Ability to work on multiple projects and meet and track deadlines continuously under minimal supervision.

• Must be able to troubleshoot system issues up through the layers of the OSI model.

• Must have excellent written, oral, and interpersonal communication skills and demonstrated use of initiative and organizational abilities.

• Knowledge of system monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting.

• Prefer experience with ADFS/SSO administration and configuration.

• Strong analytical abilities.

• Assist with the planning, testing, installation, deployment, maintenance, security, support, and administration of server hardware, operating systems, and third-party applications.

• Maintain system backups and monitor logs.

• Monitor and tune the systems to achieve optimum performance levels.

• Provide engineering level end-user support as needed.

• Work effectively and diplomatically with peers and users, share expertise with peers, and encourage a team-oriented environment.

• Work with third-party vendors to support systems installed locally or hosted.

Here's my System Specs for the purposes of determining whether or not I can run VMs on it and how fast it would be...

CPU
AMD FX-6300 83 °C (Yowza, don't know what's going on with these temps...just cleaned it the other day, not running anything intensive.)
Vishera 32nm Technology
RAM
8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 667MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
MSI 760GMA-P34(FX) (MS-7641) (CPU1) 79 °C
Graphics
IPS231 (1920x1080@60Hz)
2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 (Gigabyte) 34 °C
Storage
223GB TOSHIBA-TR150 ATA Device (SSD) 28 °C
1863GB Western Digital WDC WD20EZRZ-22Z5HB0 SCSI Disk Device (SATA) 30 °C
931GB Hitachi HDE721010SLA330 SCSI Disk Device (SATA) 40 °C

 

[InsaneNutter]

Be able to talk a bit about your experience with all of the above, for example how you manage updates for multiple Windows servers at your current / past jobs.

Have you deployed Office 365? how did that go? what problems did you have? how did you resolve them?

Be able to talk about PowerShell scripts you have wrote in the past and so on.

Good luck with the interview, it sounds like a pretty interesting job.

 

[FAST6191]

Those specs should be absolutely fine for a small test bed setup such that you can do the things in the list above to learn where things are and some of their quirks. Not going to be enough for a real world deployment but this is not that.

Anyway big boy sysadmin it is. I try never to work for local government (or in the UK the NHS which is kind of the same thing) but sounds like they might just have their ducks in a row there. The spec is written by someone that knows of what they speak and does not appear to have been too bastardised by HR before it got to you.

"SCCM"
Have fun with that one. It is the thing used to allow some of the non windows machines/phones/whatever to all conform to what is need to speak to the relevant emails, file shares... With everybody on a new install of plain windows it is awesome, for a more real world setup then yeah.

If you want some open source tools that do something like what that list of acronyms/initalisms does then
https://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
https://www.zabbix.com/features

http://davmail.sourceforge.net/

https://puppet.com/products/how-puppet-works
https://docs.chef.io/chef_overview.html

http://www.webmin.com/

https://ninite.com/pro

Cheating maybe but saying I am not so familiar with that but I have used [this open source equivalent] might get you out of a pinch.

" • Must be able to troubleshoot system issues up through the layers of the OSI model."
What an odd what of phrasing it. That said it means it wants you to be able to run and terminate wire right through to be able to do things like figure out when an email provider updates their allowed access methods. I don't know if I have met anybody that thinks about things in a strict OSI model (it is a wonderful learning and framing tool, bit abstract for real world troubleshooting). The trouble is now I would probably have to raise the grim spectre of Cisco or Juniper for if you are dealing with big boy networks it is almost certain to be one of those two involved and they are not gentle like home routers.

 

[Wolvenreign]

Oh, SCCM does the same thing as Puppet, automating VM operations and such? Then I think I get the idea! Thanks, Sensei Fast!

You know, if I get the job, I might ask you to give me a 5 day trial by fire, drill marathon so that I'm ready to hit the pavement when the referee says "go!". Appreciate the help, Sensei.

Edit: Lol nope I read that wrong. Silly me. Still, useful advice, Sensei.

Those specs should be absolutely fine for a small test bed setup such that you can do the things in the list above to learn where things are and some of their quirks. Not going to be enough for a real world deployment but this is not that.

Anyway big boy sysadmin it is. I try never to work for local government (or in the UK the NHS which is kind of the same thing) but sounds like they might just have their ducks in a row there. The spec is written by someone that knows of what they speak and does not appear to have been too bastardised by HR before it got to you.

"SCCM"
Have fun with that one. It is the thing used to allow some of the non windows machines/phones/whatever to all conform to what is need to speak to the relevant emails, file shares... With everybody on a new install of plain windows it is awesome, for a more real world setup then yeah.

If you want some open source tools that do something like what that list of acronyms/initalisms does then
https://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/
https://www.zabbix.com/features

http://davmail.sourceforge.net/

https://puppet.com/products/how-puppet-works
https://docs.chef.io/chef_overview.html

http://www.webmin.com/

https://ninite.com/pro

Cheating maybe but saying I am not so familiar with that but I have used [this open source equivalent] might get you out of a pinch.

" • Must be able to troubleshoot system issues up through the layers of the OSI model."
What an odd what of phrasing it. That said it means it wants you to be able to run and terminate wire right through to be able to do things like figure out when an email provider updates their allowed access methods. I don't know if I have met anybody that thinks about things in a strict OSI model (it is a wonderful learning and framing tool, bit abstract for real world troubleshooting). The trouble is now I would probably have to raise the grim spectre of Cisco or Juniper for if you are dealing with big boy networks it is almost certain to be one of those two involved and they are not gentle like home routers.

You know, even before I knew about the OSI model, everything that it taught me just seemed like basic hardware/software troubleshooting knowledge. I just knew where the problem originated by the properties of the problem. I never think about OSI these days. But since it's part of the interview, I might as well frame a couple of hypothetical problems in that fashion.

 

[FAST6191]

I am a few years out of having to pay real attention to windows server (suffice it to say there is a reason I still think about PDCs/BDCs enough for it to be my quick and dirty example) and as such I don't think I would be the best choice for a crash course. Indeed if you wanted to go through a book/exam for whatever the MCSE is called this week for the current version of server/whatever they have installed/whatever they are in the process of upgrading to it would probably put you in better stead.

I don't know what size team you will be going into but most won't necessarily expect you to hit the ground running -- you probably will get the grunt work at first (password changing, new users/promoted users needing new permissions, cramming yourself into the cabinet to play with the patch panel when a new port wants to be livened up, providing said "engineering level end-user support as needed." aka be the last in line (but first in your department) when the helldesk inevitably fails to be able to answer a user's probably quite basic question).

On the OSI thing you just described how everybody I know thinks about things, give or take the Cisco people which still think like that but use Cisco's magic words instead.

 

[Wolvenreign]

Here's some of the interview material I've come up with so far.

As sysadmin at Sidewayz Entertainment, I've had a few close scrapes with total system failure thanks to a couple of Microsoft's bad updates. I mean, I'm sure you've heard of Red October, but last year, it was Blue October, for blue screens of death. It was KB407-something, I believe, which was just all kinds of messy. I tell ya, you leave a substitute systems admin in charge for one weekend and he pushes out the update that was well-documented to be your bleeding edge test VM, and suddenly you've got a nightmare case of conflicting Delta and Cumulative updates. It just makes me glad that I was able to use SCCM's remote control and remote view to be able to use a simple powershell dsmc backup script I wrote to upload the pre-KB407 backup VMs out to our active directory file system and get everything running again. The sysadmin there couldn't use the USB backups I made since the update was causing the USB slots to go haywire. From what I hear from a couple of my sysadmin peers, I was lucky to even have the internet work long enough for me to connect and run the Powershell executable. Every E-mail I sent out to that guy after that was me playing the role of IT "Smokey The Bear", trying to prevent another active directory forest fire. "Remember, only YOU can read the manual!"

Then after that absolute nightmare, Microsoft slips in the same update to my deployed VMs AGAIN, AND without informing me, only this time, it causes an error in Excel so that XLS files don't work properly anymore. I recovered it using the same method as before, only this time, I shut off WSUS until the launch of SCCM 1710 in November. Whoever is giving WSUS its instructions in Microsoft seriously needs to double check their work.

Lately I've been trying to convince the CEO that we need to move off of ESX and start deploying ESXi, and at first he was hesitant, thinking that since ESX is paid for and ESXi is free, that ESXi would be inferior. He even joked that the i in ESXi stood for inferior! But I warmed him up to the idea, and it's one of those things I started working on very recently. Sadly I don't think I'll get to finish it since the company is dying off anyway.

I put "intermediate" down on my Microsoft Exchange/Office 365 experience because I really run it alongside the more free and open source tools that are available to accomplish much the same thing.

Question 1: How big of a team will I be working with on this project?

Question 2: Since I noticed that the job description mentioned the OSI, I was wondering if there are a lot of Cisco people who work closely with the State of Indiana's IT department. In my experience, it isn't brought up very often outside of Cisco circles and the tech school I went to back in 2012.

Question 3: I also noticed that the job description mentioned "Provide engineering level end-user support as needed.". Might I take this to mean that I'll be working closely with the helpdesk? I believe my strong communication skills, as well as previous helpdesk experience will assist me strongly with this particular requirement.

Question 4: When I saw Microsoft SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager) listed on this job posting, it made me wonder if this project is for deployment of a brand new set of Windows servers, since it tends to work better as an overall systems administation tool when it is installed with a new deployment as opposed to adding it to pre-existing systems.

What do you guys think?

 

[FAST6191]

"blame the other guy" is a tricky game to play. It may well have been their fault but one learns to be wary of those which blame their problems on others. In that case it might also become why didn't you lock it down harder? If it was your holiday for two weeks that is one thing but a weekend is a different matter.
In my book a "substitute systems admin" is someone that knows enough that should your whole team get hit by a bus then they can keep things ticking for a long as it takes for HR to call the agency and say "money no object".

SCCM works fine on older deployments, it is more when you get mixed selections of devices along with mixed versions of windows/updates that it gets fun*, though at the same time if you do need the sorts of things a Windows domain gives you then it is right up there -- you will get people swearing themselves hoarse about it but just like visual studio it will get the job done.

*think the tech clueless C level type just has to have their ancient android work with the company network and flat refuses to use one provided for him, art department wants macs because they can, you have a bunch of legacy machines for certain potentially very important uses (or because some department was cheap), some other high levels "have" to be able to work from home/remotely but you know full well the logs in 5 years will show little and less of them using it... and it all to work with nary a hitch type scenario.

The Cisco comment was more meant as they still think like you or I would -- poke the mouse, see if the network connected icon is there, check the url or do an ipconfig to make sure there are no conflicts or something depending upon what looks likely... just when cisco start introducing their terms you hear those come from them rather than all the ones most people used to windows/linux/everything else/iso standards calls it. That said as a question it plays well enough.

 

[Originality]

I’m enjoying reading these accounts as I’m now 5 months into my new job on the service desk of a MSP and I’ve seen so many examples of all of the above in that time.

Although the worst setup I’ve seen so far is a company that tries to run everything off a collection of flaky XenApp servers. Complete virtualisation is not ideal for a production environment (even though Fujitsu want to claim it is).

 

[CMDreamer]

Don't be afraid of the questions, but of the answers. They'll give or take it all. Keep calm.