Windows Administrator Interview Questions

  1. What is Active Directory?
  2. What is LDAP?
  3. Can you connect Active Directory to other 3rd-party Directory Services? Name a few options.
  4. Where is the AD database held? What other folders are related to AD?
  5. What is the SYSVOL folder?
  6. Name the AD NCs and replication issues for each NC
  7. What are application partitions? When do I use them
  8. How do you create a new application partition
  9. How do you view replication properties for AD partitions and DCs?
  10. What is the Global Catalog?

  11. How do you view all the GCs in the forest?
  12. Why not make all DCs in a large forest as GCs?
  13. Trying to look at the Schema, how can I do that?
  14. What are the Support Tools? Why do I need them?
  15. What is LDP? What is REPLMON? What is ADSIEDIT? What is NETDOM? What is REPADMIN?
  16. What are sites? What are they used for?
  17. What’s the difference between a site link’s schedule and interval?
  18. What is the KCC?
  19. What is the ISTG? Who has that role by default?
  20. What are the requirements for installing AD on a new server?
  21. What can you do to promote a server to DC if you’re in a remote location with slow WAN link?
  22. How can you forcibly remove AD from a server, and what do you do later? • Can I get user passwords from the AD database?
  23. What tool would I use to try to grab security related packets from the wire?
  24. Name some OU design considerations.
  25. What is tombstone lifetime attribute?
  26. What do you do to install a new Windows 2003 DC in a Windows 2000 AD?
  27. What do you do to install a new Windows 2003 R2 DC in a Windows 2003 AD?
  28. How would you find all users that have not logged on since last month?
  29. What are the DS* commands?
  30. What’s the difference between LDIFDE and CSVDE? Usage considerations?
  31. What are the FSMO roles? Who has them by default? What happens when each one fails?
  32. What FSMO placement considerations do you know of?
  33. I want to look at the RID allocation table for a DC. What do I do?
  34. What’s the difference between transferring a FSMO role and seizing one? Which one should you NOT seize? Why?
  35. How do you configure a “stand-by operation master” for any of the roles?
  36. How do you backup AD?
  37. How do you restore AD?
  38. How do you change the DS Restore admin password?
  39. Why can’t you restore a DC that was backed up 4 months ago?
  40. What are GPOs?
  41. What is the order in which GPOs are applied?
  42. Name a few benefits of using GPMC.
  43. What are the GPC and the GPT? Where can I find them?
  44. What are GPO links? What special things can I do to them?
  45. What can I do to prevent inheritance from above?
  46. How can I override blocking of inheritance?
  47. How can you determine what GPO was and was not applied for a user? Name a few ways to do that.
  48. A user claims he did not receive a GPO, yet his user and computer accounts are in the right OU, and everyone else there gets the GPO. What will you look for?
  49. Name a few differences in Vista GPOs
  50. Name some GPO settings in the computer and user parts.
  51. What are administrative templates?
  52. What’s the difference between software publishing and assigning?
  53. Can I deploy non-MSI software with GPO?
  54. You want to standardize the desktop environments (wallpaper, My Documents, Start menu, printers etc.) on the computers in one department. How would you do that?
  55. Explain hidden shares. Hidden or administrative shares are share names with a dollar sign ($) appended to their names. Administrative shares are usually created automatically for the root of each drive letter. They do not display in the network browse list.
  56. How do the permissions work in Windows 2000? What permissions does folder inherit from the parent? When you combine NTFS permissions based on users and their group memberships, the least restrictive permissions take precedence. However, explicit Deny entries always override Allow entries.
  57. Why can’t I encrypt a compressed file on Windows 2000? You can either compress it or encrypt it, but not both.
  58. If I rename an account, what must I do to make sure the renamed account has the same permissions as the original one? Nothing, it’s all maintained automatically.
  59. What’s the most powerful group on a Windows system? Administrators.
  60. What are the accessibility features in Windows 2000? StickyKeys, FilterKeys Narrator, Magnifier, and On-Screen Keyboard.
  61. Why can’t I get to the Fax Service Management console? You can only see it if a fax had been installed.
  62. What do I need to ensure before deploying an application via a Group Policy? Make sure it’s either an MSI file, or contains a ZAP file for Group Policy.
  63. How do you configure mandatory profiles? Rename ntuser.dat to ntuser.man
  64. I can’t get multiple displays to work in Windows 2000. Multiple displays have to use peripheral connection interface (PCI) or Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) port devices to work properly with Windows 2000.
  65. What’s a maximum number of processors Win2k supports? 2
  66. I had some NTFS volumes under my Windows NT installation. What happened to NTFS after Win 2k installation? It got upgraded to NTFS 5.
  67. How do you convert a drive from FAT/FAT32 to NTFS from the command line? convert c: /fs:ntfs
  68. Explain APIPA. Auto Private IP Addressing (APIPA) takes effect on Windows 2000 Professional computers if no DHCP server can be contacted. APIPA assigns the computer an IP address within the range of 169.254.0.0 through 169.254.255.254 with a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0.
  69. How does Internet Connection Sharing work on Windows 2000? Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) uses the DHCP Allocator service to assign dynamic IP addresses to clients on the LAN within the range of 192.168.0.2 through 192.168.0.254. In addition, the DNS Proxy service becomes enabled when you implement ICS.
  70. Describe how the DHCP lease is obtained. It’s a four-step process consisting of (a) IP request, (b) IP offer, © IP selection and (d) acknowledgement.
  71. I can’t seem to access the Internet, don’t have any access to the corporate network and on ipconfig my address is 169.254.*.*. What happened? The 169.254.*.* netmask is assigned to Windows machines running 98/2000/XP if the DHCP server is not available. The name for the technology is APIPA (Automatic Private Internet Protocol Addressing).
  72. We’ve installed a new Windows-based DHCP server, however, the users do not seem to be getting DHCP leases off of it. The server must be authorized first with the Active Directory.
  73. How can you force the client to give up the dhcp lease if you have access to the client PC? ipconfig /release
  74. What authentication options do Windows 2000 Servers have for remote clients? PAP, SPAP, CHAP, MS-CHAP and EAP.
  75. What are the networking protocol options for the Windows clients if for some reason you do not want to use TCP/IP? NWLink (Novell), NetBEUI, AppleTalk (Apple).
  76. What is data link layer in the OSI reference model responsible for? Data link layer is located above the physical layer, but below the network layer. Taking raw data bits and packaging them into frames. The network layer will be responsible for addressing the frames, while the physical layer is reponsible for retrieving and sending raw data bits.
  77. What is binding order? The order by which the network protocols are used for client-server communications. The most frequently used protocols should be at the top.
  78. How do cryptography-based keys ensure the validity of data transferred across the network? Each IP packet is assigned a checksum, so if the checksums do not match on both receiving and transmitting ends, the data was modified or corrupted.
  79. Should we deploy IPSEC-based security or certificate-based security? They are really two different technologies. IPSec secures the TCP/IP communication and protects the integrity of the packets. Certificate-based security ensures the validity of authenticated clients and servers.
  80. What is LMHOSTS file? It’s a file stored on a host machine that is used to resolve NetBIOS to specific IP addresses.
  81. What’s the difference between forward lookup and reverse lookup in DNS? Forward lookup is name-to-address, the reverse lookup is address-to-name.
  82. How can you recover a file encrypted using EFS? Use the domain recovery agent.
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