Weekly Quizzes

📝 WEEK 1 QUIZ — Systems Foundations

  1. What’s the difference between a process and a service?

  2. Why is rebooting considered a bad first troubleshooting step?

  3. Where would you look for logs on:

    • Windows?

    • Linux?

  4. What does it usually mean when a service fails immediately after starting?

  5. What’s the purpose of file permissions?

  6. Why might a service depend on another service?

  7. What’s one reason a service starts manually but not on boot?

  8. What information do logs give that error popups don’t?

  9. Why is “it’s running” not the same as “it’s working”?

  10. Explain how you would troubleshoot a service that won’t start.

📝 WEEK 2 QUIZ — Identity & Access

  1. Authentication vs authorization — explain the difference.

  2. Why should permissions be assigned to groups, not users?

  3. What happens when a user is removed from a group?

  4. What’s an OU and why does it exist?

  5. Why might a user fail login even with the correct password?

  6. What’s the difference between local and domain users?

  7. How do NTFS permissions differ from share permissions?

  8. What does “least privilege” mean in practice?

  9. How would you troubleshoot a login failure?

  10. Why is identity the foundation of security?

📝 WEEK 3 QUIZ — Networking Fundamentals

  1. What’s the role of a default gateway?

  2. Why can you ping an IP but not a hostname?

  3. What does DNS actually do?

  4. What happens if two devices have the same IP?

  5. What’s the difference between a subnet and a VLAN?

  6. When would you use traceroute?

  7. Why might a server have internet access but no inbound access?

  8. What’s the purpose of DHCP?

  9. How do you prove a problem is DNS-related?

  10. Walk through troubleshooting “server unreachable.”

📝 WEEK 4 QUIZ — Linux Administration

  1. Why is Linux critical for cloud roles?

  2. What does systemctl manage?

  3. Where are Linux logs commonly stored?

  4. What’s the difference between root and sudo?

  5. What do file permissions rwxr-x--- mean?

  6. Why might a service run as a specific user?

  7. What’s SSH and why is it preferred?

  8. What would you check if a Linux service won’t start?

  9. How do environment variables affect services?

  10. Explain how you’d fix a broken Linux service.

📝 WEEK 5 QUIZ — Windows Server Administration

  1. What roles commonly run on Windows Server?

  2. Why is DNS critical to Active Directory?

  3. What happens if DNS is misconfigured in a domain?

  4. What’s Group Policy used for?

  5. Why don’t GPOs apply instantly?

  6. What’s the difference between local policy and domain policy?

  7. Why are file servers still relevant?

  8. How do you troubleshoot a GPO issue?

  9. What’s the risk of overusing admin privileges?

  10. Describe a basic Windows Server troubleshooting flow.

📝 WEEK 6 QUIZ — Cloud Core (AWS/Azure)

  1. What is the shared responsibility model?

  2. What’s the cloud equivalent of a physical server?

  3. Why should you avoid long-lived access keys?

  4. What’s the difference between IAM users and roles?

  5. Why are regions and availability zones important?

  6. What’s object storage vs block storage?

  7. Why is “cloud is someone else’s computer” misleading?

  8. How is patching different in the cloud?

  9. What happens if you misconfigure permissions in cloud?

  10. Explain cloud infra in sysadmin terms.

📝 WEEK 7 QUIZ — Cloud Networking

  1. What is a VPC/VNet?

  2. What makes a subnet “public”?

  3. Why does a private subnet exist?

  4. What’s the purpose of a route table?

  5. What’s the difference between a firewall and security group?

  6. Why might an instance not reach the internet?

  7. Why might the internet not reach an instance?

  8. What role does NAT play?

  9. How does cloud networking mirror on-prem?

  10. Troubleshoot “instance unreachable.”

📝 WEEK 8 QUIZ — Security & Access

  1. What does least privilege protect against?

  2. Why is over-permissioning common?

  3. What’s the risk of shared credentials?

  4. Why rotate keys and passwords?

  5. What’s the difference between identity and network security?

  6. Why are security groups stateful?

  7. What’s a common cloud security mistake?

  8. Why should servers not be public by default?

  9. How do you audit access?

  10. Describe securing a new server.

📝 WEEK 9 QUIZ — Scripting & Automation

  1. Why is automation critical for infra roles?

  2. Bash vs PowerShell — when would you choose each?

  3. What problem does Git solve?

  4. Why should scripts be version-controlled?

  5. What’s idempotency?

  6. What’s the danger of manual configuration?

  7. Why automate user creation?

  8. How do scripts reduce human error?

  9. What’s a basic automation you’d deploy first?

  10. Explain how automation scales teams.

📝 WEEK 10 QUIZ — Infrastructure as Code

  1. What problem does Terraform solve?

  2. What is state and why does it matter?

  3. Why is destroy/recreate powerful?

  4. Why shouldn’t infra be click-built?

  5. How does IaC improve disaster recovery?

  6. What’s a provider?

  7. Why use variables?

  8. How does IaC help teams?

  9. What’s drift?

  10. Compare IaC to manual provisioning.

📝 WEEK 11 QUIZ — Operations & Reliability

  1. Logs vs metrics — difference?

  2. Why monitor before failures?

  3. What makes a good alert?

  4. Why are backups useless without restores?

  5. What’s MTTR?

  6. Why document incidents?

  7. What’s the danger of alert fatigue?

  8. How does monitoring differ in cloud?

  9. What’s an SLA?

  10. Walk through responding to an outage.

📝 WEEK 12 QUIZ — Capstone / Readiness

  1. Explain your hybrid architecture.

  2. Why did you choose those security controls?

  3. How would you rebuild everything from scratch?

  4. What fails first in your design?

  5. How would you scale it?

  6. What’s the biggest risk in your setup?

  7. How would you monitor it?

  8. How would you onboard a new admin?

  9. How does this qualify you beyond helpdesk?

  10. What role are you ready for now?