Exam

This page has the necessary information about the System Administration course exam.

Exam dates

The exam dates are the following:

• 14.00-17.00 24.05.2022 (room 2030 and remotely)
• 14.00-17.00 07.06.2022 (room 2005 and remotely)
• 14.00-17.00 15.06.2022 (room 2005 and remotely)
• 14.00-17.00 28.06.2022 (room 2005 and remotely) (ONLY retake)

Exam eligibility

To be eligible for taking the exam:

• All labs must have been completed.
• Feedback must have been submitted (after Kubernetes lab).
• Let a TA know after you feel the labs have been completed, so we can have a final validation. (This needs to be done at least a week before the exam date). Also, let us know on which exam date you're planning to come.
• Once you have been approved by a TA, register for the exam in OIS.

Exam preparation

After the Kubernetes lab, once you have validated the completion of all the labs, you are free to do anything with your machine, including breaking it. This is to help you prepare for the exam.

We will also provide you with three levels of Ansible playbooks for preparation, one per week until the exams. These playbooks break your Lab VMs making them similar to the exam environment. You can try to fix these machines and bring all the scoring back to green for preparation.

• Level 1 playbook introduces relatively simple failures that you should be able to handle.
• Level 2 playbook makes more complicated changes that require knowledge of debugging tools (host, dig, netstat, nmap) to find the cause.
• Level 3 playbook breaks things that have difficult to find causes and/or have problems hiding behind problems. This level is more challenging than the exam.

During the exam, all materials are allowed. You can use the internet, your written notes, lab machines and Ansible as you see fit. The only thing disallowed is talking with other students.

Exam format

The exam timeslot is 3 hours.
The actual exam is made to take around 2 hours.

The one extra hour is to give TAs time to fix any technical issues if some students should have any and allow them to spend time on one-on-one grading session.

You can come to the classroom for the exam or take the exam remotely. Please let us know when coming to the classroom and you need a computer to use.
When taking the exam remotely, you have to be on a Zoom call the whole time, with the camera turned on. The Zoom link will be shared through Slack before the exam.

The exam is very similar to how the labs took place. The exam begins from the moment you get access to the Exam project in the https://minu.etais.ee environment. It's one of your tasks to setup the machine appropriately, gain access and be able to continue working on the machine.

The exam environment is similar to the labs, but not the same. There are different domain names, IP addresses, VMs, and the external services students used in the labs (CA, Consul, Scoring, Object) that might be hosted on separate addresses.

The scoring server works the same way. The students main task is to get the whole Nagios scoring server about their machine green. While the scoring server helps you estimate your grade, the final grade is not based solely on the scoring server.

After a student has finished the exam, or the time runs out, the last part is a one-on-one session with a TA. During this time, the TA will validate what has been done by the student. If the student can show that some tasks have been completed, but scoring does not show this, then TAs take this into consideration for the grade. Also, issues caused by small typos and other non-technical issues can be pardoned.

If there's any uncertainty about which grade to give to the students, the TAs are free to ask questions about the environment, or about how to debug/solve some issues.

Exam retake

Unlike usual courses, you are allowed to take the exam twice before an official retake.

Every student has the right to two exam tries. After the second try, they can choose which grade they want to be published to the study information system, and the other one is discarded.

If the published grade is negative, they can also retake the exam during the retake slot.

As an example - a student comes for the exam on the 24th of May. Receives the grade C. The student then has a right to also come during any of the other slots and decides to come on the 7th of June. Receives a B during that exam. The final grade is B, which the student chose. The student cannot retake the exam, as they received a positive grade.

If a student receives a negative grade on both tries, then the student can try for a better grade during a retake.

Matching the exam times is the student's responsibility. If the student takes an exam for the first time on the third slot and has not talked it through with the TAs beforehand, they cannot have a second chance, and that grade will be published in the study information system. If that grade is negative, they can have a retake on the assigned time slot.

Exam tasks

The exam will consist of starting the machine + 5 other topics, each of them will have several Nagios checks about them. The topics are freely chosen from the topics of the labs. For an example, the topics can be:

• DNS
• Web
• Mail
• TLS
• Docker/DevOps

Each topic you successfully complete during the exam will upgrade your grade by one point.\\ For example, if you successfully complete DNS topic, you will earn grade E.
If you successfully complete Web, you will get D.
If you complete Mail, you will earn C.
After TLS you get B.
Finally completing Docker/DevOps you will get you A.

Some topics depend on other topics (e.g. TLS depends on Web, Mail/Web depend on DNS). You will have hard time trying to earn E while only trying to complete the last topic, since it is built upon on all of the previous topics. But you can do it, if you can prove in the one-on-one session that you have completed the tasks.

The exam consists of a broken VM that you have to fix. Broken in a sense, that services won't work or produce desired output.

Intentional mistakes in the VM what to expect include wrong permissions, shut down services, services not starting, missing configuration, wrong configuration, etc. Everything that we did the labs, but fixing it won't require you to go through the whole lab - just understanding how to find the issue and fix it is enough.

You don't have to deal with typos 127.0.0.1 that could be written as 127.O.O.1 All of the intentional mistakes will be made based on the course labs, everything you have to fix you have already fixed once if you have gotten to the exam. No surprises in that sense.