How to Become a Desktop Engineer? Interview Questions..

A) Tell me something about yourself.
Tell about your education, place you belong to, some struggle in life which shows that you have positive attitude and will to fight the odds.

B) Technical Questions:

1) What is Active Directory?
A central component of the Windows platform, Active Directory directory service provides the means to manage the identities and relationships that make up network environments. For example we can create, manage and administrator users, computers and printers in the network from active directory.

2) What is DNS? Why it is used? What is "forward lookup" and "reverse lookup" in DNS? What are A records and mx records?
DNS is domain naming service and is used for resolving names to IP address and IP addresses to names. The computer understands only numbers while we can easily remember names. So to make it easier for us what we do is we assign names to computers and websites. When we use these names (Like yahoo.com) the computer uses DNS to convert to IP address (number) and it executes our request.

Forward lookup: Converting names to IP address is called forward lookup.

Reverse lookup: Resolving IP address to names is called reverse lookup.

'A' record: Its called host record and it has the mapping of a name to IP address. This is the record in DNS with the help of which DNS can find out the IP address of a name.

'MX' Record: its called mail exchanger record. Its the record needed to locate the mail servers in the network. This record is also found in DNS.

3) What id DHCP? Why it is used? What are scopes and super scopes?

DHCP: Dynamic host configuration protocol. Its used to allocate IP addresses to large number of PCs in a network environment. This makes the IP management very easy.

Scope: Scope contains IP address like subnet mask, gateway IP, DNS server IP and exclusion range which a client can use to communicate with the other PCs in the network.

Superscope: When we combine two or more scopes together its called super scope.

4) What are the types of LAN cables used? What is a cross cable?
Types of LAN cables that are in use are "Cat 5" and "Cat 6". "Cat 5" can support 100 Mbps of speed and "CAT 6" can support 1Gbps of speed.

Cross cable: Its used to connect same type of devices without using a switch/hub so that they can communicate.

5) What is the difference between a normal LAN cable and cross cable? What could be the maximum length of the LAN cable?
The way the paired wires are connected to the connector (RJ45) is different
in cross cable and normal LAN cable.
The theoretical length is 100 meters but after 80 meters you may see drop in speed due to loss of signal.

6) What would you use to connect two computers without using switches?
Cross cable.
7) What is IPCONFIG command? Why it is used?
IPCONFIG command is used to display the IP information assigned to a computer. From the output we can find out the IP address, DNS IP address, gateway IP address assigned to that computer.

8) What is APIPA IP address? Or what IP address is assigned to the computer when the DHCP server is not available?
When DHCP server is not available the Windows client computer assigns an automatic IP address to itself so that it can communicate with the network computers. This ip address is called APIPA. ITs in the range of 169.254.X.X.
APIPA stands for Automatic private IP addressing. Its in the range of 169.254.X.X.

9) What is a DOMAIN? What is the difference between a domain and a workgroup?
Domain is created when we install Active Directory. It's a security boundary which is used to manage computers inside the boundary. Domain can be used to centrally administrator computers and we can govern them using common policies called group policies.
We can't do the same with workgroup.

10) Do you know how to configure outlook 2000 and outlook 2003 for a user?
Please visit the link below to find out how to configure outlook 2000 and outlook 2003. http://www.it.cmich.edu/quickguides/qg_outlook2003_server.asp