DNS is a fun rabbit hole for interviews, for sure.
My favorite one to see on a resume is NIS. If you are listing NIS and don't have horror stories or other things to say about NIS, that's a really good indicator of the value of your resume.
I intentionally list NIS on my resume because it is such a fun conversation topic to go on about how security models changed over time, all the ways NIS is terrible, but also how simple and useful it was.
For DNS, my favorite interview question goes like this,
How would you verify DNS is resolving from within a pod on Kubernetes?
After listening to the answer, add some constraints:
1. Common networking utilities like ping, nslookup, dig, etc are not available
2. Container user is unpriviledged
3. su/sudo do not work
This can lead to some elaborate k8s troubleshooting or the simple, and correct, answer of getent hosts.
I don't know Kubernetes, so it's very possible that Kubernetes enforces that name resolution is always DNS and only DNS (a "hosts: dns" line in /etc/nsswitch.conf, without any additional stuff like files which would mean resolution via /etc/hosts), in which case getent is indeed correct, but in the general case, there is no system-intrinsic tool that tests DNS only, and you have to use something like dig.
Lol.
This must be an IT thing because a developer would go, "ah, what is this shit? Hang on, I did this once back in 08', let me being up the documentation' and proceed to bootstrap a production-fix by EOD.
As an icebreaker, I pick out items from their resume that stand out and look like strengths. My goal is to play to those strengths and get them comfortable talking about their past battles.
1. Most people can do the job. Even programming isn't that bad, I've met very few complete incompetents.
2. Their personality and interest in the topic are better correlates for their success in the team and generally.
I'm still not going back until I can configure for TCP to be the default.
It's usually the case that everything works until it doesn't. When it's DNS that doesn't work, good luck debugging it unless you've got war stories to tell.
I dunno, I've been running containers in prod for a while now and I don't recall Alpine being a problem. Maybe it varies by your workload?
Asking about Alpine in a production environment was always good way finding who has container experiences of watching C-Beams glitter in the dark to those who only just read a "10 Docker Container Tricks; #8 will blow your mind!" blog post from 2017.