702-100 Sample Questions & Answers

uname -a is a standard POSIX command available on all three BSD variants. It prints all available system information, including the operating system name, hostname, release level, version, and machine hardware name, making it a reliable first step for identification.

The sysctl utility is fundamental to all BSDs for querying kernel state. The kern.version MIB specifically contains a detailed string with the OS name, release, and build information. Using sysctl -n kern.version provides this data in a clean, scriptable format across FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD.

This command correctly combines find and grep. find /var/log -mtime -1 -type f locates all regular files (-type f) in /var/log modified within the last 24 hours (-mtime -1). The -exec grep -il "error" {} + part is the most efficient way to process the results. It executes grep with -i (case-insensitive) and -l (list filenames only), passing multiple filenames found by find ({}) at once (+) to a single grep command, which is much more efficient than executing grep for every single file.

The du command estimates file space usage. The -s flag provides a summary for each argument, and -h makes the output human-readable (e.g., KB, MB, GB). The glob /* expands to all files and directories directly under the root /, so du -sh /* will calculate and display the total size of each top-level directory individually, allowing the administrator to quickly identify the largest consumers of space.

True. Since OpenBSD 6.0, the pkg_add utility is configured by default to use https://cdn.openbsd.org for fetching packages. This simplifies the initial setup process as administrators no longer need to manually edit /etc/installurl to point to a suitable mirror.

The standard configuration file for the ntpd daemon on NetBSD (and most other Unix-like systems, including FreeBSD) is /etc/ntp.conf. This file is used to specify the upstream time servers, restrict access, and configure other operational parameters of the NTP daemon.

The pw command is the standard utility for user and group management in FreeBSD. The correct syntax is pw useradd [username]. The -G flag specifies supplementary groups. The -s flag sets the login shell. The -d flag sets the home directory, and -m is crucial as it creates the home directory if it doesn't exist. The -g flag (lowercase) sets the primary group, not supplementary groups.

The traceroute command on BSD systems uses the -I (uppercase i) flag to specify the use of ICMP ECHO_REQUEST packets for probing, instead of the default UDP datagrams. This is often useful for bypassing firewalls that might block UDP but allow ICMP for diagnostics.

When a BSD system's kern.securelevel is raised to 1 or higher, certain restrictions are enforced, even for the root user. One of the primary restrictions is that flags on files marked as immutable (schg) or append-only (sappnd) cannot be removed. Therefore, even as root, the administrator cannot unset the flag to delete the file until the system is brought back to single-user mode and the securelevel is lowered.

A hard link is a directory entry that points to the same inode as another file. The file's data is only removed from the disk when the inode's link count drops to zero. Deleting one hard link (or the 'original' file) just decrements the link count.

Since a hard link is a pointer to an inode, and inode numbers are unique only within a specific filesystem, a hard link cannot point to an inode on a different filesystem.

This sequence correctly implements the desired logic. pkill -TERM transcode-daemon sends the TERM signal, which is a graceful shutdown request. The && operator ensures the rest of the command only runs if the pkill command succeeds (i.e., it found and signaled a process). sleep 5 waits for five seconds. The final pkill -KILL transcode-daemon sends the non-ignorable KILL signal to any transcode-daemon process that might still be running. This is a common and robust pattern for service shutdown scripts.