I had a 2 hour layover and was browsing the newsgroups.  A person posted a question wondering about interview questions regarding IIS and .NET 2.0.  I’m sure there are many other questions that I didn’t think to ask, here is the list I came up with.  If you have any questions, feel free to post them to the comments and I’ll update the thread.

PS: This is meant for a ‘systems’ or ‘itpro’ type person and not necessarily a developer type individual.

General IIS related questions

• How do you isolate and troubleshoot an ASP and / or ASP.NET application?
• What is your idea of locking down a server?
• How do you feel about having developers or anyone else making changes directly in production?  Aka how do you normally handle change management.
• What perfmon counters do you find useful in troubleshooting an IIS or related problem.
• Do you have experience in working with web-farms, load-balancing environments?
• What is your ideal way of handling content.  Remote Storage / NAS (network attached storage) vs. local content and replication.  If you use local content and replication what tools do you to use?
• Are you familiar with DFS?
• What debugging tools do you use for IIS?
• What / Where would you put global .NET settings.  How would you lock them down?
• Do you have any experience with SSL certificates?
• Do you have experience with machines with multiple IP’s and how to handle several sites / applications on a machine.
• What is your preference of handling machine accounts?  Do you like local vs. Active Directory based accounts.
• Do you have experience with working in an AD environment that supports IIS.
• Do you have experience with NLB (network load balancing) that comes with IIS.
• How do you monitor the applications / sites to ensure the uptime is appropriate.  This might apply more to a monitoring environment, but it is good to know what to monitor.
• Are you familiar with compression and the benefits.
• Do you know what MIME types are for?
• Do you know how to list all running applications on a server to determine which application pools are owned by what sites. (IISAPP)
• Are you familiar with IISState, IIS Debug Diag. SSL Diag, SMTPDiag in the resource kit.
• What tools do you use or have experience in load-testing an application.
• What are some of the tools provided by MS.  WCAT, TinyGet, WAST.
• Do you know how to configure host-headers and how they related to DNS.
• What is your backup and recovery strategy for IIS
• How would you handle migrating to another box?
• How do you handle changes in IIS, scripting or manual changes?
• Are you familiar with scripting languages such as VBScript, JScript, Powershell.
• Are you familiar with IISCfg and related scripts such as adsutil
• Do you have experience supporting multiple environments of IIS (different domains, dev / test /integration / production)
• Are you familiar with ways to connect to remote databases such as db2, oracle, sql server
• Do you know the differences between anonymous, integrated, basic, digest authentication.
• What is your preferred method of publishing content?  FTP? FrontPage? WebDAV? Folder copy? Publish to a staging machine and replicate to the content source either on a nas or individual nodes.
• Are you familiar with the other services in SMTP, FTP?
• Do you know how to configure a smarthost?
• Does the built-in FTP service support host-headers?
• Do you know the benefits of using a COM+ package vs. Regsvr32
• What certain local group is necessary if it is configured as a application pool user.
• Do you know how to check a COM+ component to ensure it will not leak memory.
  

.NET 2.0

• Can you run the 1.1 and 2.0 on the same box?  What are the limitations.
• Can you explain what the ‘/bin’  folder is used for.
• Do you know what user instancing is.
• Do you know the difference between precompiled applications and publishing the source code.
• Do you have any experience with partial trust or CAS (code access security)
• What types of things cause an appdomain or application pool recycle.
• What are the new folders in .NET 2.0 and what are they used for.
• How / why does the machine key need to be the same across all machines in a web-farm.

IIS7

• What makes the IUSR account unique in IIS7 vs. previous versions.
• What are some of the new ways of troubleshooting, Logging in IIS7
• What are the major benefits of IIS7?  (FREB, Integrated Pipeline, IUSR same on all w2k8 boxes, Shared configuration, Modular architecture, configuration changes