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Comment by InvaderFizz | Hacker News Reader

It's still going to be pretty common for at least a few years, and the now incorrect assumption that it is still broken I'm sure will persist for a decade or more among those who have been burned and thus moved on from Alpine and do not follow it.

DNS is a fun rabbit hole for interviews, for sure.

My favorite one to see on a resume is NIS. If you are listing NIS and don't have horror stories or other things to say about NIS, that's a really good indicator of the value of your resume.

I intentionally list NIS on my resume because it is such a fun conversation topic to go on about how security models changed over time, all the ways NIS is terrible, but also how simple and useful it was.

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NIS is a good one. I have UUCP as a skill on my resume as an easter egg but no one ever asks about it.

For DNS, my favorite interview question goes like this,

How would you verify DNS is resolving from within a pod on Kubernetes?

After listening to the answer, add some constraints:

1. Common networking utilities like ping, nslookup, dig, etc are not available

2. Container user is unpriviledged

3. su/sudo do not work

This can lead to some elaborate k8s troubleshooting or the simple, and correct, answer of getent hosts.

After constraint 1, this devolves to a weird game of "does the interviewee realize I don't consider `getent hosts` to be a 'common networking utility' so it's still available?"

Except it's... not quite correct. getent performs NSS resolution, not DNS resolution, so its output depends on the value of the hosts field in your /etc/nsswitch.conf, which could be set to something fun like LDAP or something else.

I don't know Kubernetes, so it's very possible that Kubernetes enforces that name resolution is always DNS and only DNS (a "hosts: dns" line in /etc/nsswitch.conf, without any additional stuff like files which would mean resolution via /etc/hosts), in which case getent is indeed correct, but in the general case, there is no system-intrinsic tool that tests DNS only, and you have to use something like dig.

Do you really do arbitrary trivia in interviews?

Lol.

This must be an IT thing because a developer would go, "ah, what is this shit? Hang on, I did this once back in 08', let me being up the documentation' and proceed to bootstrap a production-fix by EOD.

DevOps/SRE. Our technical interview is pretty regimented and cookie cutter. Over the course of one hour we cover a wide base of practical knowledge to validate the candidates existing knowledge or their ability to quickly acquire the needed knowledge (use of google/stack overflow is encouraged).

As an icebreaker, I pick out items from their resume that stand out and look like strengths. My goal is to play to those strengths and get them comfortable talking about their past battles.

I think talking to people is more effective.

1. Most people can do the job. Even programming isn't that bad, I've met very few complete incompetents.

2. Their personality and interest in the topic are better correlates for their success in the team and generally.

> It's still going to be pretty common for at least a few years, and the now incorrect assumption that it is still broken I'm sure will persist for a decade or more among those who have been burned and thus moved on from Alpine and do not follow it.

I'm still not going back until I can configure for TCP to be the default.

I still use NIS because hosts files are faster than DNS.

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