Had an interview today (well, yesterday now) with a well known company out of Palo Alto… One of the things that stuck with me was when I was asked to differentiate between /bin and /sbin… I answered that sbin was where system files that would be run primarilly by root would go… He corrected me saying that was the case with both /bin and /sbin but that /sbin was where statically linked binaries go…

Care to guess who was right?

But maybe they are statically linked, right…?

[bswopes@beast ~]$ ldd /sbin/shutdown
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x00489000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x00470000)

He also asked me for three ways to enter single user mode… I said ‘init 1’ and booting with ‘single’ or ‘1’… I couldn’t think of a third way and told him so… he said it was ‘telinit’, which under redhat (which he specified I should assume)…

[bswopes@beast ~]$ ls -l /sbin/telinit
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Dec 18 09:10 /sbin/telinit -> init

He did catch me when he asked me to translate the TCP/IP model to the OSI model and I missed the application layer.