IT Fundamentals Midterm (MCQs)

The system administrator is responsible for each of the following tasks except...

... training users.

... troubleshooting hardware

... updating the operating system.

... securing a website.

... installing software.

Securing a website

Which of the following skills would an IT person employ to find and fix a problem with the operating system?

System troubleshooting

An IT person would probably be expected to study each of the following topics except for ...

... ethics.

... The IT person would be expected to study them all.

... programming.

... operating systems.

... networking.

The IT person would be expected to study them all

Which of the following behaviors might be considered as unethical from the position of a system administrator?

- Setting up backdoor accounts

- Accessing other people's files

- Reading employees' emails

- Changing data files in the - organization's system for one's own gain

- All of the above

All of the above

An IT person in general would not be expected to handle which of the following tasks?

- Be on call 24/7

- Make recommendations on computer purchases

- Train other employees

- Monitor employees' files and web browsing behavior to ensure compliance with organizational IT policies

- All of the above are tasks that an IT person might be asked to perform.

Monitor employees' files and web browsing behavior to ensure compliance with organizational IT policies

Volatility is a property of which of the following?

Memory

Which of the following types of files would come closest to about 1 MByte in size?

A textfile with 1 page of text

An uncompressed movie

A long song stored in an mp3 file

A highly compressed movie

A small black and white image file

A small black and white image file

Which of the following is the largest storage capacity?

- 3,000,000 bytes

- 4 Gigabytes

- 1,000,000 bits

- 100 Megabytes

- 10,000 Kilobytes

4 GB

If users use passwords containing non-alphabetic characters or a combination of upper and letter case letters, this ...

Promotes computer security

The concept of translating a program from a more readable language like Python or Java into the computer's native machine language is called ...

Compilation

A security administrator would be responsible for administering which of the following?

A firewall

Which of the following could be called a peripheral device?

Printer

The system unit houses the CPU and memory chips, all placed on ...

A motherboard

A computer system consists of the hardware, software and ...

... programs.

... network.

... periferal devices.

...All of the above

... users.

Users

Detecting that a computer is running slowly because of a computer virus infection would be an example of which type of IT skill?

Troubleshooting

What does an interrupt interrupt?

The CPU during its fetch-execute cycle

Which of the following is true in (competitive) multitasking?

The CPU switches between processes when a timer forces a context switch.

Two threads will always share the same ...

Program code

To determine where a given page is stored in memory, the operating system uses ...

the page table

When the CPU moves from one process to another in multitasking, this is known as ...

a context switch

Which of these hardware devices can force the processor to move from one process to another in multitasking?

status flags

timer

redy queue

stack pointer

program counter

Program counter

Which portion of the operating system can be personalized by the user.

The shell

The use of permissions to control who can and who cannot access resources is part of which of these operating system roles?

Protection

Which form of processing would run one process at a time, but when that process requires I/O, the CPU would switch temporarily to another process?

Multitasking

GRUB is an example of ...

A boot loader program

Which of the following forms of scheduling will cause processes to wait the minimum amount of time?

Shortest job first

The portion of the operating system that must be resident in memory at all times is

The kernel

Which of the following forms of processing does not provide any form of interaction with the user but instead requires I/O be handled before/after program execution?

Multiprogramming

Which of the following forms of process management did MS-DOS use?

Single tasking

During a context switch, what is being switched?

one process' priority for another

all of the above

one process' data for another

one process' register values for another

one process' pages for another

All of the above

If two processes are deadlocked, what is your best move to free them from deadlock?

Kill one of the processes

When two threads need to "meet up" in order to share data, this is known as ...

Rendezvous

Concurrent processing means that the operating system executes processes in an overlapped fashion, which of the following is not a form of concurrent processing?

Batch processing

The process of swapping is triggered under which circumstance?

A page fault

In order for the operating system to be able to communicate with a specific piece of hardware, one must install the appropriate ...

device driver

Where is swap space located?

Hard disk

Bourne is an example of a Linux ...

shell

in Linux, the administrator account is called ...

root

If a process generates an address that is part of another process' area of memory, this is known as ...

a memory violation

If an entry in a page table is listed as not valid, then accessing that page will cause ...

A page fault

With file blocks distributed across the file system instead of being stored in consecutive disk blocks, accessing the file requires traversing the blocks creating what one might call a ...

Linked list

If a hard disk contains 4 platters, how many read/write heads will the hard disk contain?

8

In Linux, you would expect to find many of the system administrator programs stored under ...

/sbin

In DOS (Disk Operating System), which of the following symbols is used to denote a directory in a path?

\

The time it takes the read/write head to move across the disk to the proper track is called ...

Seek time

Which of the following tasks would not be possible for a system administrator to do on the file system?

- Add remote storage to be accessed over network

- Mount and unmount specific partitions

- All of the above are possible.

- Encrypt portions of the file system

- Establish disk quotas

All of the above

In a linked list, to reach the 5th block, how many links do you have to follow?

4

In file compression, lossy compression ...

reduces the file size by discarding some of the data

Which of the following Linux commands is like the DOS command dir?

ls

The /proc top level directory is different from most other Linux top level directories because it ...

is not stored on disk but instead stored in memory

The surface of a hard disk is broken into which types of regions?

Tracks and sectors

Which of the following files stores the currently mounted file systems (partitions) in Linux? [By the way, partitions are logical divisions of a single physical storage device (like an HDD or SSD) that the operating system treats as separate, independent drives]

/etc/mtab

In Windows, the Programs top level directory stores applications software. In Linux, the equivalent directory is ...

/usr

File name extensions are primarily used ...

... by the operating system to know what software to use to open the file.

In order to determine which directory you are currently in, which commands would you use respectively in Windows and Linux?

Nothing in windows, pwd in linux

Which of the following files stores user account information?

/etc/passwd

In Linux, devices like the disk drives, USB drives, network devices and monitor are treated as files. These "files" are stored under which directory?

/dev

The file system for Windows and Linux are "shapes" like a ...

Tree

Mounting ...

Makes a partition available

In Linux, the system administrator's home directory is stored under ...

/root

In Linux, a soft link is called ...

A symbolic link

Files are broken into fixed sized units called ...

blocks

Under which Linux top-level directory would you find most of the configuration files?

/etc

The zip and tar programs can be used to create ...

archives

Under which Linux top-level directory would you find the user directories?

/home

The main purpose of a group in both Linux and Windows is to permit ...

to permit secure access to network resources like printers and file servers.

In the Linux useradd instruction, which option would you use to add the user to a number of existing groups?

-G

In Linux, the -f parameter used in the passwd command does which of the following?

it forces the user to change their password the next time they log in

The Linux instruction passwd -x 30 zappaf will ...

require that zappaf change his password within 30 days.

When a new user is created in Linux, an entry of user account information is automatically placed into ...

/etc/passwd

The Linux instruction chown foxr:cit371 foo.txt changes foo.txt's ...

group and owner

In the Linux useradd instruction, the -m option specifies ...

To create a home directory

A special program that is used to prevent user logins, when this is set as the user’s login shell --> any login is immediately denied and the user cannot log in interactively, meaning it is commonly used for system accounts and service users

a shell of /sbin/nologin

A strong password requires all of the following except ...

it should be generated randomly

Which Linux file stores user passwords in an encrypted form?

etc/shadow

The file afile has permissions of 764. The instruction chmod g-w,o-r will alter its permissions to be ...

740

In Linux, you might use the useradd instruction to create numerous new accounts over the GUI User Manager tool because ...

- All of the above are reasons.

- you can use command line editing to easily modify each new submission over filling out the GUI over and over.

- you can write a script to automate the process.

- you can specify additional groups more easily from the command line.

- you do not have to enter an initial password using useradd.

all of the above are the reasons

Assume the file foo.txt has permissions of -rwxrw-r--. After issuing the instruction chmod g-w foo.txt, which of the following is not true?

- The file is still readable by everyone.

- The owner is the only person who can write to the file.

- The world (other) has no access to the file at all.

- The owner of the file still has full access to the file (rwx).

- All of the above are true.

the world (other) has no access to the file at all

In order to discover your password, someone might call you on the phone and try to trick you into divulging it to them, for instance by acting as someone from your organization's IT group. This is often called ...

Social Engineering

The process of identifying a user through a username and password is known as ...

Authentication

In the Linux useradd instruction, the -u option allows you to ...

change the default user ID

What operating system task is access control lists used for?

Protection

In Linux, when creating a user account for some user, username, by default, the user's directory will be placed in ...

/home/username

If a file's long listing has permissions of lrwxrwxrwx, what can we conclude?

The file is actually a hard link

In Linux, directories need to be ______ for a user to cd into them.

Executable

What is the difference between > and >>?

> stores the output to a file, >> appends the output to a file

Consider the following history list:

15. ps

16. ps aux

17. ls -l *

18. ls /etc/*.conf

19. cd ..

20. cp foo.txt ~foxr

To re-execute the last instruction (the cp instruction) in the history list, which of the following would not do this?

- !c

- !!

- !20

- All of the above would re-execute the last instruction.

- control+n

control+n

Assume the current directory has the following files:

file1.txt file2.txt file3 file4 files5.txt

How many files would be listed in the instruction ls file*.txt ?

3

Linux shell runs in an interpreted environment. What does "interpreted" mean?

instructions, when entered, are converted to executable form and executed.

The following alias has an error:

alias lsl=ls -l

What error is it?

The right hand side, ls -l, needs to be placed inside of single quote marks

Consider the following history list:

15. ps

16. ps aux

17. ls -l *

18. ls /etc/*.conf

19. cd ..

20. cp foo.txt ~foxr

Pressing control+p three times followed by the enter key repeats which of the following instructions?

ls /etc/*.conf

Your PS1 variable is set to "\d $" What will your prompt display?

The current date followed by a space and $

Consider the following history list:

15. ps

16. ps aux

17. ls -l *

18. ls /etc/*.conf

19. cd ..

20. cp foo.txt ~foxr

You would use which of the following sequences of keystrokes to delete the first entry on the line and then submit the instruction?

Control+a, escape+d,

What does !! do?

It executed the last instruction again

Assume Q=15.

The instruction Q=$Q+1 will result in Q storing ...

15+1

What does the following instruction do?cat foo1.txt foo2.txt > foo3.txt

it takes the contents of file1.txt and file2.txt and copies them into the file foo3.text

What does the PATH environment variable store?

All of the directories to test for any command entered

Assume the current directory has the following files:

carpenters cartoons creative_stuff.txt creatures customers.txt

If you type cat ca, what will happen?

The bash interpreter will beep at you

Consider the following history list:

15. ps

16. ps aux

17. ls -l *

18. ls /etc/*.conf

19. cd ..

20. cp foo.txt ~foxr

The notation !cd repeats which of the following instructions?

cd..

Assume you are user dukeg, which of the following directories would be equivalent to ~zappaf?

usr/zappaf