Note: The first 2 episodes of the interview series can be found here and here.
Question 1:
The interviewer comes in and hands you the following ls -la listing:
# ls -la total 108 dr-xr-x---. 7 root root 4096 Sep 5 07:16 . dr-xr-xr-x. 22 root root 4096 Sep 1 17:43 .. -rw-------. 1 root root 15432 Sep 5 06:36 .bash_history -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 18 May 20 2009 .bash_logout -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 176 May 20 2009 .bash_profile -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 176 Sep 23 2004 .bashrc -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Sep 5 07:16 -f ...
They say the -f file must go; would you please delete it?
I’d like to present you the book I am trying to finish reading for some time now; a very dense book, with good practices and interesting details on how to keep planet-wide systems up & running with a bunch of very well prepared people.

What are the lessons one needs to walk away with, from this book? A few bullets:
Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring tool for all the Amazon Cloud services. It offers both White Box and Black Box monitoring for services managed by Amazon and can be extended to work with user-generated monitoring data.
This text covers the integration of a simple MySQL monitoring script with Amazon CloudWatch.
MySQL Monitoring
Let’s assume that we want to monitor the number of active connections to the MySQL server and have an indication on when this figure becomes close to the maximal value defined in the configuration file (max_connections). In order to be portable, we may want to also report this value to the monitoring engine, even if it’s unlikely that a change may occur without explicit human intervention.
MySQL provides 3 numeric figures we may be interested in: