Pearson XK0-005 New Attempt

The dig command is used for querying DNS information. To retrieve the MX records for a domain (which indicate where emails should be routed), the command dig mx foo.com is used. This returns the mail servers associated with the domain, including their priority levels.

The file that holds the system configuration for journal when running systemd is /etc/systemd/journald.conf. This file contains various settings that control the behavior of the journald daemon, which is responsible for collecting and storing log messages from various sources. The journald.conf file can be edited to change the default values of these settings, such as the storage location, size limits, compression, and forwarding options of the journal files. The file also supports a drop-in directory /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d/ where additional configuration files can be placed to override or extend the main file. References: CompTIA Linux+ (XK0-005) Certification Study Guide, Chapter 18: Automating Tasks; journald.conf(5) - Linux manual page

If the application server can ping the database server by its IP address but not by its hostname, it indicates a DNS resolution issue. The most likely cause is incorrect DNS server configuration. The engineer should verify the DNS settings in /etc/resolv.conf or the network configuration.

The reason the firewall rules are not active is that the firewalld service is not enabled. This means that the service will not start automatically at boot time or after a system reload. To enable the firewalld service, the systems administrator needs to use the command sudo systemct1 enable firewalld. This will create a symbolic link from the firewalld service file to the appropriate systemd target, such as multi-user.target. Enabling the service does not start it immediately, so the systems administrator also needs to use the command sudo systemct1 start firewalld or sudo systemct1 reload firewalld to activate the firewall rules.

The other options are not correct reasons for the firewall rules not being active. iptables is not conflicting with firewalld, because firewalld uses iptables as its backend by default. The wrong system target is not activated, because firewalld is independent of the system target and can be enabled for any target. FIREWALL_ARGS has no value assigned, but this is not a problem, because FIREWALL_ARGS is an optional environment variable that can be used to pass additional arguments to the firewalld daemon, such as --debug or --nofork. If FIREWALL_ARGS is empty or not defined, firewalld will use its default arguments. References: firewalld.service(8) - Linux manual page; firewall-cmd(1) - Linux manual page; systemct1(1) - Linux manual page