Getting Started With Solaris

An Introduction to Solaris for Beginners by Brian Leonard. Presented at Oracle Tech Days, Hyderabad, India, March 2010.

• Part 1 - About Solaris
  
  Solaris is for Enterprises
  OpenSolaris is for Developers
  
  VirtualBox allows Developers running Host Operating Systems (i.e. OpenSolaris, Mac, Linux, Windows, etc.) to run other operating systems (i.e. Solaris 10)
  Demo of Import VirtualBox Solaris 10 2 Gigabyte Image into Virtual Box
  
  Solaris 10 is mature, has been around since 2005, 8 releases
  
  GNOME Interface demonstration
  
  
• Part 2 - Where is Everything?
  
  Important Directories
  /usr/sbin - system administration commands
  /usr/bin - normal user commands
  /var - variable files (i.e. logs)
  /etc - configuration files
  /opt - third party software
  /export/home - home directories for users
  
  
  Add a user "dan"
  machine# useradd -m -d /export/home/dan -s /usr/bin/ksh dan
  
  Set the user password for "dan"
  machine# passwd dan
  ****
  ****
  
  Set the user password for "dan" where he is forced to change the user password on first login
  machine# passwd -f dan
  ****
  ****
  
  
• Part 3 - Users
  
  Rights Profiles
  
  Adding System Administrator Commands to your path
  machine# echo "PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin export PATH" >>/etc/profile
  machine# . /etc/profile
  
  Running commands against the profile permissions available
  machine# pfexec usermod -P "Primary Administrator" dan
  
  Converting root from a user into a role which can only be assumed by a user
  machine# pfexec usermod -K type=role root
  
  machine# su - root
  
  
  Adding the ability for a user (dan) to be allowed to assume the root role
  machine# pfexec usermod -R root dan
  
  
• Part 4 - Managing Software
  
  Solaris SVR4 Packaging
  pkgadd, pkginfo
  

Hopefully, this will be beneficial!

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-- UPDATE! -- 2010-05-15 -- More Videos to continue the introduction to Solaris!

• Part 5 - System Services
  
  Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF)
  - operates services like web servers
  - provides for automatic restart of failed services
  - give the ability for hierarchal relationships between services
  
  Basic User Commands for checking status
  
  Check for all running services
  # svs | more
  
  Check for all configured services (running and not running)
  # svcs -a | more
  
  Checked for failed services
  # svcs -x
  
  Check for impacted services to a failed service
  # svcs -xv
  
  Show the long version of the svc with the process id
  # svcs -lp ssh
  
  Basic Administration Command for changing status
  
  Enable, Disable, or Restart Services
  
  
  # svcadm enable [service]
  # svcadm disable [service]
  # svcadm restart [service]
  
  
• Part 6 - Networking
  
  Important Commands
  
  View Physical Devices
  # dladm show-dev
  
  View Network Interfaces
  # ifconfig -a
  
  To change a Host Name with supporting Network information
  # sys-unconfig
  
  Important Network Files
  
  Name Service Configuration File
  /etc/nsswitch.conf
  
  DNS Name Resolver Configuration File
  /etc/resolv.conf
  
  Static Host Configuration File
  /etc/hosts
  
  
• Part 7 - Devices Names and File Systems
  
  Naming of a Devices
  c#t#d#[s|p]#
  - c=Controller
  - t=Target (not used in IDE devices)
  - d=Device
  - s=Slice (not used in IDE)
  - p=Partition (Intel has 4 primary partitions)
  
  Identifying Devices
  # format
  
  File Systems
  - UFS - Default file system
  - ZFS - New file system
  - NFS - Network File System
  
  ZFS
  - introduced in Update 6 (2008-10 or 10/08)
  - can now use ZFS for root file system
  - Using ZFS for root file system has performance benefit with LiveUpgrade via a snapshot!
  - Migrating from USF to ZFS: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-541/ggpdm
  
  NFS
  Show mounts on a remote server
  # showmount -e [server]
  
  Mount a remote server
  # cd /net/[server]