CompTIA Server + Questions & Answers., Exams of Computer Science

Download CompTIA Server + Questions & Answers. and more Exams Computer Science in PDF only on Docsity! CompTIA Server + Questions & Answers. What is a server? - ✔ A computer device that responds to or "services requests from clients. A client is a machine that makes requests to a server. Can software programs be considered servers? - ✔ Yes. For example, an Oracle database server could be considered both as a hardware device acting in the role of a server, and also as a database software application that acts as a server. What is a general purpose server? - ✔ Typically perform multiple functions and so can not be classified as any specific type of server. An example wold be a server in a small company that handles file, print, e-mail, and web proxy functions. What is an appliance server? - ✔ Single-function servers built with the idea of being "'plug-ready" with only very minimal configuration. Appliance servers are field- replaceable units (FRUs) in that if one fails, you just plug in another to replace it. What is a mail server? - ✔ Send, receive and store e-mail. they usually support industry standard e-mail protocols such as post office protocol (POP3), internet message access protocol (IMAP), simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) and multipurpose internet mail extensions (MIME). What is POP3 used for? - ✔ Incoming mail What is Internet Message Protocol (IMAP) used for? - ✔ Incoming mail What is Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for? - ✔ Outgoing mail What is multipurpose Internet mail extensions (MIME used for? - ✔ Multimedia data. It adds the ability to send and receive multimedia files as attachments. Both sender and receiver must have MIME capability. What is a firewall server? - ✔ Can be hardware or software based. They protect an organizations internal network and servers from outside penetration. They scan incoming and outgoing data traffic. Firewall security can be configured in many ways such as packet filtering and permitting or denying access based on the original internet protocol (IP address). What is a Web Server? - ✔ They host web sites. They provide security through user authentication, data encryption and web permissions for access to particular data or folders. Digital certificates validate the web server and its supporting organization internet users. Most popular are software products for web servers are Apache (Open Source) and Internet Information Server (IIS/Microsoft). What is a terminal server? - ✔ Provide remote dial-in access to other servers or a network. To support this access, they use serial protocols such as point-to-point (PPP) or serial line IP or (SLIP). Which is more popular, PPP or SLIP as a terminal service? - ✔ PPP since it supports more protocols e.g., TCP/IP/IPX/SPX, etc. It adds features like data encryption and compression. Adequate security is big concern with dial-in facility. There must be more ways to authenticate users to determine who they say they are. What is a database server? - ✔ They store data. They usually run relational database products such as SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2 and MySQL or competing software databases to perform this function. What is a file server? - ✔ Provide shared storage and shared file access to files. They tie together clients within workgroups through file sharing. What is a print server? - ✔ Control printers for shared access, thereby avoiding the need for each individual to have their own computer-attached printer. What is a fax server? - ✔ Provide shared telephone fax access, analogous to the same way print servers share printers. They are often considered superior to fax machines because they can service remote users, add security, transmit faxes faster, and they don't jam. What is a news server? - ✔ Run software to store and distribute news articles to and from newsgroups either on a specific network or on the Internet. They Internet's USENET consists of many news servers running Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP). What is an FTP server? - ✔ Transfer files across the internet. They support user authentication for security purposes. Or, you can allow users to log in with anonymous FTP if you want files to be accessible to the public without user authentication. What is a System Network Architecture or SNA server? - ✔ Enable clients to access IBM mainframes and other IBM-proprietary computers using IBMs SNA networking protocol. SNA protocol is multi-layered and hierarchical. Microsoft's SNA server and its successor product host integration server allow personal computer clients to access IBM mainframes and iSeries servers in data centers. What is a Network Attached Storage (NAS) Server? - ✔ Are an alternative to local file servers. They use NIC (network interface cards) or to connect to the network and are assigned Internet addresses. NAS is very flexible since all kinds of storage devices can use this principle to connect to the network. It's very easy to take NAS devices on-or-off line. They can be used by any client or server on the network regardless of OS. What does scaling out do? - ✔ Scaling out adds more servers to the network to increase capabilities. It means more servers to manage and administer, and could possibly lead to data sharing and security issues. On the positive side, scaling out means greater redundancy among systems and probably increased availability of at least some systems. It's very easy to scale out using cookie-cutter approach to setting up new servers. To manage a large group or network of servers, you need? - ✔ Software that helps manage the servers based on one of the two predominant protocols e.g., SNMP, DMI and MIF. What is SNMP or Simple Network Management Protocol? - ✔ Raised alerts when issues occur and informs server administrators about problems and changes. Notification can be by e-mail, pager alert, log message or network message to the client the administrators logged to. What are the components of SNMP? - ✔ ANMP agents, SNMP management system console, Management information base (MIB) and SNMP community. What is Desktop Management Interface (DMI)? - ✔ Less popular alternative to SNMP. It complements SNMP by carrying more specific levels information, it is sometimes used in conjunction with SNMP. What is a motherboard? - ✔ The primary circuit card to which all others in the computer connect. What is a BUS? - ✔ The data path the motherboard provides for communication across the system. It is 32 or 64 bits wide. Wider means more bits transferred simultaneously and is generally faster. It is extended via the I/O expansion bus. Common I/O bus standards are PCI, etc. What is PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect)? - ✔ Plug-and-play by default auto- configuration. What does BUS mastering eliminate? - ✔ The CPU from communications. It allows devices to communicate across the BUS with little or no processor involvement, so it can be faster and also conserve CPU resources. What is PCI Interrupts and PCI Steering? - ✔ More addresses are available for interrupt requests or IRQs. What is a PCI hot swap? - ✔ Devices can be replaced while the computer remains up. What is a PCI hot plug? - ✔ Boards can be powered on/off independently, so adapters can be added/removed without powering down the entire server. Are all all PCI cards hot capable? - ✔ No. What does peer PCI BUS do? - ✔ Increases expansion slots, offers flexible bus width and speed, and facilitates load balancing. What is PCI-X? - ✔ An extension standard to PCI and is generally physically backward compatible with cares based on PCI 2.x. Max bandwidth varies from 1024 MBps for V.1 up to 2.14 GB/s or 4.3 GBps. They are parallel interface, 64.bit data path at faster speeds than PCI, 10-fold performance increase over PCI. What is PCI-Express? - ✔ Intended to replace PCI, PCI-X, AGP, etc. Uses point-to- serial connections called lanes, between devices & slots. Faster, smaller cables and connectors, many other benefits. Hot swappable and hot plug capable. What is AGP? - ✔ Accelerated graphics port. For graphics cards for video displays. Not commonly encountered in servers. ISA and EISA are obsolete standards that preceded PCI. USB or Universal BUS? - ✔ An external BUS rather than an interface card or BUS. Fast serial port communications designed to replace traditional serial and parallel ports. Hot swappable and plug-and-play. Provides power to lower-power devices. A USB hub expands one USB port to serveral devices. USB 1.0 transfers data at? - ✔ 1.5 MB per second. USB devices can present a security risk because they are highly portable, hot swappable and plug-and-play. What is firewire? - ✔ An external BUS rather than an interface BUS. A competing standard to USB. Also known as IEEE 1394 interface. Hot swappable and plug-and- play. What is clock frequency? - ✔ Number of times per second that a quartz crystal vibrates or oscillates. Measured in millions or billions of times per second Mhz or GHz. They provide synchronous system operation and helps determine system speed performance. Processor or CPU instructions are executed on the basis of the clock cycle. High frequency means better performance. What are chipsets? - ✔ These subdivide the BUS into logical components that run at different clock frequency speeds, thereby avoiding the bottleneck that a single system- wide clock speed would create. Chipsets create hierarchical BUS that places the slower buses beneath the faster ones for maximum performance. What is front side BUS or FSB? - ✔ Path to communicate with the main memory and graphics card running at motherboard clock speed. What is the North Bridge Chipset? - ✔ Divides FSB (or the processor BUS) from teh PCI bus and manages data traffic in that area. It sets the speed for teh FSB and determines how many CPUs and how much memory the machine can have. Often called system controller chip. What is the South Bridge Chipset? - ✔ Divides the PCI from the ISA BUS and Super I/O chip and manages data traffic in that area for slower devices like IDE ports, USB ports, ISA bus, etc. Sometimes called the peripheral BUS controller. What is accelerated hub architecture? - ✔ Know as Intel Hub Architecture (IHA) was designed to replace the traditional North Bridge/South Bridge design. IHA offers higher- speed channels between sections and it optimizes data transfer based on data type. What is I20 Intelligence Input/Output? - ✔ has an I20 processor on the device itself (such as an adapter) that communicates with the I2o driver. I20 may still be on the exam but it is largely defunct. What are the 3 key factors that effect the speed and performance of CPUs - ✔ Clock speed, data bus width and cache memory. What is data BUS width? - ✔ How many bits can pass into or out of the processor in a single cycle. It is increasingly 64-bit (versus slower (32-bit) for servers. 64-bit also yields a larger memory address space. What does cache do? - ✔ Speeds performance by holding most recently-used data. How many levels of cache are there? - ✔ Typically two or three levels. From fastest to slowest and from smallest t largest, they are? - ✔ L1 cache - proximate to the CPU runs at CPUs speed rather than motherboard speed. L2 cache - used to be discrete (separate) from the CPU, running the back side bus. Since advanced transfer cache it is on the CPU die like the L1 cache. L3 cache - a third-level of cache on some systems. What is cache memory? - ✔ Applies to places other than the CPU or servers. For example, disk drives and CDs, DVDs also have their own cache memory. Intel XEON is targeted at servers due to advantages in? - ✔ - Cache size - Cache speed - Larger size of addressable memory - Support for advance programmable interrupt controller - Symmetric Multiprocessing or SMP What is Intel Celeron CPUs? - ✔ Pentiums with lesser cache sizes and cheaper supporting chipsets, so Celerons are nto used for servers. Though, some low-end servers due use some Celeron CPUs, they are, by and large consumer oriented chips. What is CMOS? - ✔ Complimentary metal Oxid semiconductor. Settings on the CMOS chip are maintained by a small battery that looks like a watch battery when the server is powered down and not receiving electricity. Replace the battery if the system is slowing down, as this is a sign that the battering is nearing end-of-life. How do you access your CMOS settings? - ✔ By pressing a manufacturer-specific key when the system boots. What are common CMOS settings? - ✔ Exit saving changes, hardware, CPU, memory test, DMA settings, PCI bus mastering, memory scrubbing, management port, logging, security, power management, etc. Why is it important to protect the CMOS/BIOS configuration for a server? - ✔ If someone has physical access to the server, they could easily alter these if they are not protected. If the CMOS is deprived of its battery, it loses? - ✔ The configuration information. This, if you forget teh passwords, you can eliminate them by physically removing the battery for 5 minutes. Or, you can set the motherboard jumpers for this purpose. This also clears config settings. What is a POST? - ✔ Power-on-Self-Test. This is right after the CMOS area and what is checked depends on the system and its CMOS configurations. Successful POST leads to? - ✔ Booting - the loading of the operating system. Unsuccessful POST usually stops the boot process with the manufacturer or a specific error code. Often, you'll see error warnings of information messages as booting continues. What are system resources? - ✔ Every server and motherboard support limited internal resources such as IRQ, Advanced programmable interrupt controller, etc. What is an Interrupt Request (IRQ)? - ✔ Devices use IRQs to interrupt CPU to ask for resources or to tell they have a completed task. There are 16 IRQs numbered 0 through 15. Many are pre-assigned to common devices. Can multiple devices use the same IRQ? - ✔ yes, they can use the IRQ through PCI- based IRQ steering. When you have more devices than available IRQs, you can sometimes have of IRQ contention. Operating systems sometimes assign virtual IRQs to the real IRQs to better manage tehm and avoid IRQ contention. What is an APIC? - ✔ Advanced programmable interrupt controller. It's a more advanced form of peripheral interface controller or PIC. It contains more outputs, a more complex priority scheme, and more advanced IRQ management. Intel's XEON CPUS are associated with APIC advances. Waht is DMA (Direct Memory Access)? - ✔ The resource allows devices to directly access memory without involving the processor. This conserves the CPU resource plus provides faster memory access. It has often been used, for example, for video display control. How many DMA channels are there/ - ✔ 8. Numbered 0-7. What is memory address? - ✔ Main memory consists of equal-sized units referred to bytes, each of which is given a unique memory address. It is the operating system job to ensure the memory is allocated to only one process or program at a time. This is its memory protection feature. What is the I/O port? - ✔ A memory location used for communications among devices and processes. Specific I/O ports are usually assigned particular communications roles. In Windows Server, you can view IRQ assignments, IRQ sharing conflicts adn DMA channel use, the I/O Map and dedicated memory use via the? - ✔ Device manager or teh command line program msinfo32.exe. The system administration panels provide this too. What is multitasking? - ✔ Multitasking computers can run more than a single program at one time. Multitasking is an OS system feature. Windows Server, Unix, Linux and NetWare are all multi-tasking OS's. Computers can work on multiple task or programs simultaneously when they contain? - ✔ Dual or quad core processors. What is multiprocessing? - ✔ Putting more than one processor on a computer which extends and enhances multitasking by placing multiple processors within the came computer. What is Symmetric Multiprocessing or SMP? - ✔ A multiprocessor design that ties together multiple processors on a one server, as support by SMP motherboard and server design. The multiple processors appear as one computer to the user. All of the CPUs share the same memory and theri use is coordinated by the OS. What are the advantages of SMP? - ✔ Greater CPU density, Singl-system image, greater scalability and effective handling programming problems that can be divided into many discrete tasks. What is massively parallel processing or MPP? - ✔ An alternative to SMP design. It loosely couples the multiple CPUs within the server in comparison to SMP. In MPP designs. each CPU has its own memory. Since massively parallel processing share few hardware resources among their many processors, the are called? - ✔ Shared nothing systems. What is clustering? - ✔ An alternative way to tie together multiple CPUs and harness them to common tasks is shared disk systems. What does clustering do? - ✔ Ties together entirely different computers, each with its own CPUs, memory and OS. But, the computers sahre disks. They have a coordination mechanism to ensure data integrity when writing to disks. Clusters may extend from two nodes up to? - ✔ A vendor-defined limit. An example of would be an Oracle database cluster each running its own copy of Oracle database software and each reading and writing to a single copy of the Oracle database that resides on the shared disks. What is fault tolerance? - ✔ Ability of a system to remain available after a component fails. It is one of the techniques used to achieve a high percentage of uptime e.g., high- availability. An example of a clustering system is Microsoft Cluster Server or MSCS. The OS can tie together seperate computers into high-availability cluster. What is NUMA (non-uniform memory access) computers? - ✔ A variation of SMP - there are multiple processors, all of the same type and speed, and they share teh same memory. The difference is the NUMA recognizes different speeds of memory and views memory as hierarchically arrange. NUMA tries to capitalize on this performance. What is an OS? - ✔ OS controls the system hardware and resources and provide services to application programs. It includes CPU control, memory management, device control, security and the file system. Operating systems that are designed to run on 64-bit hardware are called - ✔ 64-bit. Other OS's are normally 32-bit. What is disk partitioning? - ✔ Software helps you configure hard disks for use by teh OS. FDISK is the utility traditionally used to define disk partitions, logical portions of a disk. FDISK and FORMAT were originally? - ✔ MS-DOS commands and there are today several slightly different versions of them under different DOS and Linux releases. What is a primary partition under FDISK? - ✔ A bootable partition on which you install and OS. Up to 4 primary partitions are allowed per disk. Or you can have up to 3 and an extended partition. What is Extended Partition under FDISK? - ✔ Contains logical partitions, also known as logical drives.