Introduction to Solaris 9

In this chapter, you will
Cover the Solaris operating environment and the SunOS operating system

Learn about different types of Solaris certification exams available

Learn about the optional Solaris courses available through Sun Educational Services

Be given an overview of the exam's target material

Cover the certification process

Learn exam tips and tricks

Operating systems are the building blocks of computer systems and provide the interface between user applications and computer hardware. Solaris 9 is a multiuser, multitasking operating system developed and sold by Sun Microsystems (http://www.sun.com/), and is one implementation of the UNIX operating system that draws on both the System V (AT&T) and Berkeley (BSD) systems. It has risen from little more than a research project to become the dominant UNIX operating system in the international marketplace today. Solaris 9 is the latest in a long line of operating environment releases based around the SunOS operating system, which is currently in version 5.9. Solaris is commonly found in large corporations and educational institutions that require concurrent, multiuser access on individual hosts and between hosts connected via the Internet. However, it is also rapidly being adopted by small businesses and individual developers through Sun's promotion of the 'Free Solaris' program. In this book, when we refer to 'Solaris 9,' many of the commands and procedures will apply equally to earlier versions of Solaris 2.x. Commands for Solaris 1.x are specified only where relevant.

Many desktop computer users have never heard of the word 'Sun' in the context of computing, nor are they usually familiar with the term 'Solaris' as an operating environment. However, almost every time that an Internet user sends an e-mail message or opens a file from a networked server running Sun's Network File System (NFS) product, Solaris 9 is transparently supporting many of today's existing Internet applications. In the enterprise computing industry, Sun is synonymous with highly available, highly reliable performance hardware, while Solaris 9 is often the operating environment of choice to support database servers and application servers. Sun's hardware solutions are based around the SPARC and UltraSPARC integrated circuit technologies, which currently support more than 64 processors in a single E10000 server system.

In recent times, two of Sun's innovations moved the spotlight from the server room to the desktop. First, Sun's development of the Java programming language, which promises 'write once, read anywhere' application execution across any platform that supports the Java Virtual Machine, has revolutionized the development of networked applications. In addition, Java 'applets' now appear on many web pages, being small encapsulated applications that execute client side, while 'servlets' power the back end of many three-tier applications, such as CRM and complex HR applications.

Secondly, Sun is promoting a 'free' version of Solaris 9 for the SPARC hardware platform. However, the release of a new version of Solaris for the Intel platform has been delayed. This means that organizations that have previously committed to using Microsoft Windows or Caldera/SCO OpenServer on the Intel platform, for example, can reuse the servers currently deployed with these operations by installing Solaris 8 for Intel, and upgrading when Solaris 9 becomes available. Sun has also made Solaris 9 more accessible for desktop users, offering the StarOffice productivity suite for free, or for a limited cost, shown in Figure 1-1. StarOffice is a product that is competitive with Microsoft Office-it contains word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and database components that are fully integrated. In addition, StarOffice runs on many different platforms and in eight languages, meaning that a user on a Sun SPARCstation can share documents seamlessly with users on Linux and Microsoft Windows. The combination of a solid operating system with a best-of-breed productivity suite has given Solaris new exposure in the desktop market.


Figure 1-1: The StarOffice productivity suite
This book is a complete guide to the Solaris 9 operating environment, and for the SunOS 5.9 operating system, meaning that we will try to cover, in detail, the operational aspects of Solaris and SunOS. If you simply need to look up a command's options, you can usually make use of Sun's own online 'manual pages,' which you can access by typing man command, where command is the command for which you require help. Or, you can retrieve the text of man pages and user manuals online by using the search facility at http://docs.sun.com/. This reference will be most useful when you need to implement a specific solution, and you need practical tried-and-tested solutions. Although Solaris 9 comes with a set of traditional, unsecured remote access tools and servers by default, these are not always the best tools, in terms of security, that you should use in a production environment. For example, although ftp is fine for transferring files around a local area network, you should conduct remote exchanges of data using a secure file transfer system, such as sftp, which is a new utility supplied with the OpenSSH package. In outlining a solution to a problem, we generally introduce Sun-supplied software first, and then discuss the installation and configuration of third-party alternatives. You can also use this book as a reference for previous versions of Solaris, since much of the command syntax remains unchanged across operating system releases. Command syntax is typically identical across different platforms as well (SPARC and Intel).

If you've been keeping track of recent press releases, you may be wondering why Solaris has a version number of '9,' while SunOS has a revision level of 5.9. Since the release of Solaris 7 (SunOS 5.7), Sun has opted to number its releases sequentially with a single version number, based on the old minor revision number. This means that the release sequence for Solaris has been 2.5.1, 2.6, 7, 8, and now 9. Thus, many sites will still be running Solaris 2.6 without feeling too far left behind, especially if they don't require the 64-bit functionality for the UltraSPARC processors provided with Solaris 7 and beyond. Sun does provide 'jumbo patches' for previous operating system releases, which should always be installed when released to ensure that bugs (particularly security bugs) are resolved as soon as possible. Thus, most of the commands and topics covered in this book for Solaris 9 are equally applicable to Solaris 7, 8, and all previous releases of SunOS 5.x.

However, wherever possible, we have also included references to the SunOS 4.x operating system, which was retrospectively labeled the Solaris 1.x platform. This is because many installations have just started using SunOS 5.x in the past few years, and until Y2K problems emerged with SunOS 4.x, many sites still ran legacy applications on this platform (especially if they prefer the BSD-style SunOS 4.x to the System V-style SunOS 5.x operating system). Many Internet firewalls, mail servers, and news servers still run on SPARC architecture CPUs, and some of these models are not supported by the SunOS 5.x operating system.

Caution Making the decision to upgrade from SunOS 4.x to SunOS 5.x was tough for many Sun installations.


Fortunately, with the release of Solaris 7, 8, and 9, 64-bit computing has arrived, and a stable platform has been established. Many of the changes between Solaris 7, 8, and 9 may appear cosmetic; for example, Larry Wall's Perl interpreter has been included since the Solaris 8 distribution, meaning that a new generation of system administrators will no longer have the pleasure of carrying out their first postinstallation task. However, other quite important developments in the area of networking and administration may not affect all users but be particularly important for the enterprise.

In this chapter, we cover the background to the Solaris 9 operating environment, which really begins with the invention and widespread adoption of the UNIX operating system. In addition, we also cover the means by which Solaris 9 can run cross-platform applications; for example, Solaris for Intel is capable of running Linux binary applications by using an application called Lxrun, which is freely available from Sun. Although earlier attempts to emulate other operating systems were largely unsuccessful (for example, WABI for emulating Microsoft Windows), Sun's development of Java can be seen as a strong commitment to cross-platform interoperability. In addition, Solaris 9 provides many network management features that allow a Solaris 9 server to act as a primary or backup domain controller to manage Windows NT clients using Samba-for example, if you want the reliability of Solaris 9 coupled with the widespread adoption of Microsoft Windows as a desktop operating system.

Finally, we review some of the many sites on the Internet that provide useful information, software packages, and further reading on many of the topics that we cover in this book.
What Is UNIX?
UNIX is not easily defined, because it is an “ideal” operating system that has been instantiated by different vendors over the years, in some quite nonstandard ways. However, there are a number of features of UNIX and UNIX-like systems (such as Linux) that can be readily described. UNIX systems have a core kernel that is responsible for managing core system operations, such as logical devices for input/output (such as /dev/pty, for pseudoterminals), and allocating resources to carry out user-specified and system-requisite tasks. In addition, UNIX systems have a hierarchical file system that allows both relative and absolute file path naming, and is extremely flexible. UNIX file systems can be mounted locally, or remotely from a central file server. All operations on a UNIX system are carried out by processes, which may spawn child processes or other lightweight processes to perform discrete tasks.

Tip Processes can be uniquely identified by their process ID (PID).


Originally designed as a text processing system, UNIX systems share many tools that manipulate and filter text in various ways. In addition, small, discrete utilities can be easily combined to form complete applications in rather sophisticated ways. These applications are executed from a user shell, which defines the user interface to the kernel.

Caution Although GUI environments can be constructed around the shell, they are not mandatory.


UNIX is multiprocess, multiuser, and multithreaded. This means that more than one user can execute a shell and applications concurrently, and that each user can execute applications concurrently from within a single shell. Each of these applications can then create and remove lightweight processes as required.

Because UNIX was created by active developers, rather than operating system gurus, there was always a strong focus on creating an operating system that suited programmer’s needs. A Bell System Technical Journal article in 1978 lists the key guiding principles of UNIX development:

Create small, self-contained programs that perform a single task. When a new task needs to be solved, either create a new program that performs it or combine tools from the toolset that already exists to arrive at a solution. This is a similar orientation to the current trend towards encapsulation and independent component building (such as Enterprise JavaBeans), where complicated systems are built from smaller interacting but logically independent modules.

Programs should accept data from standard input and write to standard input; thus, programs can be “chained” to process each other’s output sequentially. Avoid interactive input in favor of command-line options that specify a program’s actions to be performed. Presentation should be separated from what a program is trying to achieve. These ideas are consistent with the concept of piping, which is still fundamental to the operation of user shells. For example, the output of the ls command to list all files in a directory can be "piped" using the | symbol to a program such as grep to perform pattern matching. The number of pipes on a single command-line instruction is not limited.

Creating a new operating system or program should be undertaken on a scale of weeks, not years: the creative spirit that leads to cohesive design and implementation should be exploited. If software doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to build something better. This process of iterative revisions of programs has resurfaced in recent years with the rise of object-oriented development.

Make best use of all the tools available, rather than asking for more help. The motivation behind UNIX is to construct an operating system that supports the kinds of toolsets required for successful development.

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of the characteristics that define UNIX, but these features are central to understanding the importance that UNIX developers often ascribe to the operating system. It is designed to be a programmer-friendly system.

The History of UNIX
UNIX was originally developed at Bell Laboratories as a private research project by a small group of people starting in the late 1960s. This group had experience with a number of different operating systems research efforts in the previous decade, and their goals with the UNIX project were to design an operating system to satisfy the objectives of transparency, simplicity, and modifiability, with the use of a new third-generation programming language. At the time of conception, typical vendor-specific operating systems were extremely large and all were written in assembly language, making them difficult to maintain. Although the first attempts to write the UNIX kernel were based on assembly language, later versions were written in a high-level language called C, which was developed during the same era. Even today, most modern operating system kernels, such as the Linux kernel, are written in C. After the kernel was developed using the first C compiler, a complete operating environment was developed, including the many utilities associated with UNIX today (for example, the visual editor, vi). In this section, we examine the timeline leading to the development of UNIX, and the origins of the two main “flavors” of UNIX: AT&T (System V) and BSD.

Origins of UNIX
In 1969, Ken Thompson from AT&T’s Bell Telephone Labs wrote the first version of the UNIX operating system, on a DEC PDP-7. Disillusioned with the inefficiency of the Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) project, Thompson decided to create a programmer-friendly operating system that limited the functions contained within the kernel and allowed greater flexibility in the design and implementation of applications. The PDP-7 was a modest system on which to build a new operating system—it had only an assembler and a loader, and it would allow only a single-user login at any one time. It didn’t even have a hard disk—the developers were forced to partition physical memory into an operating system segment and a RAM disk segment. Thus, the first UNIX file system was emulated entirely in RAM!

After successfully crafting a single-user version of UNIX on the PDP-7, Thompson and his colleague Dennis Ritchie ported the system to a much larger DEC PDP-11/20 system in 1970. This project was funded and charged with the requirement of building a text processing system for patents, the descendents of which still exist in text filters such as troff. The need to create application programs ultimately led to the development of the first C compiler by Ritchie, which was based on the B language. C was written with portability in mind—thus, platform-specific libraries could be addressed using the same function call from source code that would also compile on another hardware platform. Although the PDP-11 was better than the PDP-7, it was still very modest compared to today’s scientific calculators—it had 24K of addressable memory, with 12K reserved for the operating system. By 1972, the number of worldwide UNIX installations had grown to ten.

The next major milestone in the development of UNIX was the rewriting of the kernel in C, by Ritchie and Thompson, in 1973. This explains why C and UNIX are strongly related—even today, most UNIX applications are written in C, even though other programming languages have long been made available. Following the development of the C kernel, the owners of UNIX (being AT&T) began licensing the source code to educational institutions within the U.S. and abroad. However, these licenses were often restrictive, and the releases were not widely advertised. No support was offered, and no mechanism was available for officially fixing bugs. However, because users had access to the source code, the ingenuity in hacking code—whose legacy exists today in community projects like Linux—gathered steam, particularly at the University of California at Berkeley. The issue of licensing and AT&T’s control over UNIX would determine the future fragmentation of the operating system in years to come.

In 1975, the first distribution of UNIX software was made by the Berkeley group, and was known as the BSD. Berkeley was Ken Thompson’s alma mater, and he teamed up with two graduate students (Bill Joy and Chuck Haley) who were later to become leading figures in the UNIX world. They worked on a UNIX Pascal compiler that was released as part of BSD, and Bill Joy also wrote the first version of vi, the visual editor, which continues to be popular even today.

In 1978, the seventh edition of the operating system was released, and it supported many different hardware architectures, including the IBM 360, Interdata 8/32, and an Interdata 7/32. The version 7 kernel was a mere 40K in size, and included the following system calls: _exit, access, acct, alarm, brk, chdir, chmod, chown, chroot, close, creat, dup, dup2, exec*, exit, fork, fstat, ftime, getegid, geteuid, getgid, getpid, getuid, gtty, indir, ioctl, kill, link, lock, lseek, mknod, mount, mpxcall, nice, open, pause, phys, pipe, pkoff, pkon, profil, ptrace, read, sbrk, setgid, setuid, signal, stat, stime, stty, sync, tell, time, times, umask, umount, unlink, utime, wait, write. Indeed, the full manual for version 7 is now available online at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/index.html.

With the worldwide popularity of UNIX version 7, AT&T began to realize that UNIX might be a valuable commercial product, and attempted to restrict the teaching of UNIX from source code in university courses, thereby protecting valuable intellectual property. In addition, AT&T began to charge license fees for access to the UNIX source, for the first time. This prompted the UCB group to create their own variant of UNIX—the BSD distribution now contains a full operating system in addition to the traditional applications that originally formed the distribution. As a result, version 7 forms the basis for all the UNIX versions currently available. This version of UNIX also contained a full Brian Kernighan and Ritchie C compiler, and the Bourne shell. The branching of UNIX into AT&T and BSD “flavors” continues even today, although many commercial systems—such as SunOS—which are derived from BSD have now adopted many System V features, as discussed next.

The most influential BSD versions of UNIX were 4.2, released in 1983, and 4.3, released in 1987. The DARPA-sponsored development of the Internet was largely undertaken on BSD UNIX, and most of the early commercial vendors of UNIX used BSD UNIX rather than paying license fees to AT&T. Indeed, many hardware platforms even today—right up to Cray super computers—can still run BSD out of the box. Other responses to the commercialization of UNIX included Andrew Tanenbaum’s independent solution, which was to write a new UNIX-like operating system from scratch that would be compatible with UNIX, but without even one line of AT&T code. Tanenbaum called it Minix, and Minix is still taught in operating systems courses today. Minix also played a crucial role in Linus Torvald’s experiments with his UNIX-like operating system, known today as Linux.

Bill Joy left Berkeley prior to the release of 4.2BSD, and modified the 4.1c system to form SunOS. In the meantime, AT&T continued with their commercial development of the UNIX platform. In 1983, they released the first System V Release 1, which had worked its way up to Release 3 by 1987. This is the release that several of the older generation of mainframe hardware vendors, such as HP and IBM, based their HP-UX and AIX systems upon, respectively. At this time, Sun and AT&T also began planning a future merging of the BSD and System V distributions. In 1990, AT&T released System V Release 4, which formed the basis for the SunOS 5.x release in 1992—this differed substantially from the previous SunOS 4.x systems, which were entirely based on BSD. Other vendors, such as IBM and DEC, eschewed this new cooperation and formed the Open Software Foundation (OSF).

In recent years, a new threat has emerged to the market dominance of UNIX systems: Microsoft’s enterprise-level computing products, such as Windows NT and Windows 2000, are designed to deliver price-competitive alternatives to UNIX on inexpensive Intel hardware. In the same way that UNIX outgunned the dominant mainframe vendors with a faster, leaner operating system, Microsoft’s strategy has also been based on arguments concerning total cost of ownership (TCO), and a worldwide support scheme for an enormous installed base of desktop Microsoft Windows clients. However, the increasing popularity of Linux and the release of Solaris for Intel have forced Microsoft to defend their platform publicly, and the future of enterprise operating systems is not clear. UNIX will have an important role to play in the future, however. As desktop computing systems rapidly become connected to the Internet, they will require the kinds of services typically available under operating systems such as Solaris 9. As part of their territorial defense of the UNIX environment, many former adversaries in the enterprise computing market, such as IBM, HP, and Sun, have agreed to work towards a Common Open Software Environment (COSE), which is designed to capitalize on the common features of UNIX provided by these vendors. By distributing common operating system elements such as the Common Desktop Environment, based on X11, these vendors will be looking to streamline their competing application APIs, and to support emerging enterprise data processing standards, such as the Object Management Group’s CORBA object management service.

Features of BSD
Solaris was originally derived from the BSD distribution from the University of California. Thus commands in SunOS 4.x were very similar to those found in other BSD distributions, although these changed significantly in SunOS 5.x when System V Release 4 was adopted. For example, many veteran system administrators would still find themselves typing ps aux to display a process list, which is BSD style, rather than the newer ps –eaf, which is correct for SVR4. Before AT&T commercialized UNIX, the BSD distribution required elements of the AT&T system to form a fully operational system. By the early 1990s, the UCB groups had removed all dependencies on the AT&T system. This led to the development of many of the existing BSD systems available today, including FreeBSD and NetBSD.

The innovations pioneered at UCB included the development of a virtual memory system for UNIX, a fast file system (which supported long filenames and symbolic links), and the basic elements of a TCP/IP networking system (including authentication with Kerberos). The TCP/IP package included support for services such as telnet and ftp, and the sendmail mail transport agent, which used the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. In addition, alternate shells to the default Bourne shell—such as the C shell, which uses C-like constructs to process commands within an interpreted framework—were also first seen in the BSD distribution, as were extensions to process management, such as job control. Standard terminal management libraries such as termcap and curses also originated with BSD. Products from other vendors were also introduced into BSD, including NFS clients and servers from Sun Microsystems. Later releases also included support for symmetric multiprocessing, thread management, and shared libraries.

It is often said that the BSD group gave rise to the community-oriented free software movement, which underlies many successful software projects being conducted around the world today. However, BSD is not the only attempt to develop a “free” version UNIX. In 1984, Richard Stallman started developing the GNU (GNUs Not UNIX) system, which was intended to be a replacement for UNIX that was completely free. The GNU C and C++ compilers were some of the first to fully support industry standards (ANSI), and the GNU Bourne again shell has many more features than the original Bourne shell. You can find more information about the GNU project at http://www.gnu.org/.

Tip Several versions of BSD are still freely distributed and available, such as FreeBSD.


Features of System V Release 4
Solaris 9 integrates many features from the AT&T System V releases (including support for interprocess communication) that were missing in the BSD distributions. As we discussed earlier, many legal battles were fought over the UNIX name and source. System V was developed by the UNIX System Laboratories (USL), which was still majority owned by AT&T in the early 1980s. However, Novell bought USL in early 1993. Eventually, USL sold UNIX to Novell, which ultimately sold it to X/Open. In 1991, the OSF-1 specification was released, and although DEC is the only major manufacturer to fully implement the standard, there is much useful cross-fertilization between System V and other operating systems. Since Sun joined OSF in 1994, there has been new hope of standardizing UNIX services and APIs across platforms.

The major contributions of System V to the UNIX platform are as follows:

Enhancement of the Bourne shell, including shell functions

The STREAMS and TLI networking libraries

Remote file sharing (RFS)

Improved memory paging

The Application Binary Interface (ABI)

The major differences between SVR4 and BSD UNIX can be summarized as follows:

Boot scripts /etc/init.d in System V, /etc/rc.d in BSD

Default shell Bourne shell in System V, C shell in BSD

File system mount database /etc/mnttab in System V, /etc/mtab in BSD

Kernel name /unix in System V, /vmunix in BSD

Printing system lp in System V, lpr in BSD

String functions memcopy in System V, bcopy in BSD

Terminal initialization /etc/inittab in System V, /etc/ttys in BSD

Terminal control termio in System V, termios in BSD

The Solaris Advantage
Sun Microsystems was formed by former graduate students from Stanford and Berkeley, who used Stanford hardware and Berkeley software to develop the workstation market in the enterprise. It aimed to compete directly with the mainframe vendors by offering CPU speed and a mature operating system on the desktop, which was unprecedented. For a given price, greater performance could be obtained from the Sun workstations than was ever possible using mainframes. From one perspective, this success destroyed the traditional client/server market, which used very dumb terminals to communicate with very clever but horrendously expensive mainframe systems. The vendors of some proprietary systems, such as HP and DEC, saw their market share rapidly decline in the enterprise market because Sun delivered more “bang per buck” in performance. By 1986, UNIX was the dominant force, at the expense of operating systems like VAX/VMS, although VMS would later come back to haunt UNIX installations in the form of Windows NT. When users could have a workstation with graphics instead of a dumb terminal, there were few arguments about adopting Sun.

However, Sun’s innovation enabled departments and workgroups to take control of their own computing environments and to develop productively with the C programming language. Sun took BSD and transformed it into a commercial product, adding some useful innovations (such as NFS) along the way. This was similar in some ways to the approach of Linux companies that create distributions of useful software packages and bundle them with the Linux kernel. However, one significant difference between Sun and Red Hat Linux is that Sun has always been a company with a hardware focus—its systems were designed with the SPARC chipset and more recently the UltraSPARC chipset in mind. This has enabled Sun to create very fast workstations and servers with typically lower CPU speeds than Intel, but faster and more efficient bus performance. Sun invests heavily in hardware design and implementation for an expected commercial reward, all the more so now that Sun gives away the Solaris operating system.

The major innovations of SunOS 4.x can be summarized as follows:

Implementation of the Network File System (NFS version 2.0, running over UDP)

The OpenWindows 2.0 graphical user environment, based on X11

The OpenBoot monitor

The DeskSet utilities

Multiprocessing support

The major innovations of SunOS 5.x can be summarized as follows:

Support for symmetric multiprocessing of up to 64 processors in a single server

The OpenWindows 3.0 graphical user environment and OpenLook. Integration with MIT X11R5, Motif, PostScript, and the common desktop environment (CDE)

The Network Information Service (NIS+)

Kerberos integration for authentication

Support for static and dynamic linking

Full-moon clustering, ensuring high availability

The ability to serve NT clients as a primary domain controller

Tooltalk

Java

POSIX-compliant development environment, including single threads, multithreading, shared memory, and semaphores

Real-time kernel processing

X/OPEN-compliant command environment

Compliance with UNIX 95 and UNIX 98 standards

Support for very large (> 2G) files

Microsoft Windows emulation on the desktop with WABI

Advanced volume management (vold)

Standardized package administration and deployment tools

Standardized patch management and integration

Software-based power management

Access control lists for resource authorization

Support for centralized management of user home directories using the automounter

Improvements to NFS (version 3), running over TCP

Support for advanced networking, such as ATM, frame relay, and Gigabit Ethernet

JumpStart customization of local site installation and deployment

A 64-bit kernel architecture with Solaris 7 and later

Simplified backup and restore procedures

Simplified site administration with the AdminSuite toolkit

Hardware Support (SPARC and x86)
The classic CPU for Sun systems is the SPARC chip. Many systems in deployment today, including SPARC 5, 10, and 20, use different versions of the SPARC chip, with processor speeds of around 40–60 MHz. Later systems, which use the UltraSPARC chipset, have processor speeds (as of this writing) of up to 900 MHz. Although this may not seem fast, the bus architectures of Sun systems are much faster than their PC counterparts, more than making up for apparently slower chip speeds. Many SPARC systems are still supported in Solaris 9, although it is advisable to check with Sun to determine whether older machines such as IPCs and IPXs will be supported in future releases. Sun 4 machines and older are no longer supported by Sun, but they may run one of the BSD releases or Linux. Some older machines, such as Classics, have a very loyal support base and are still actively supported.

With the introduction of Solaris 2.1 came support for the Intel platform, supporting ISA, EISA, MCA, and PCI bus types. This performed adequately on high-end 486 systems. Given the significant variation in types and manufacturers of PC hardware, not all devices are currently supported under Solaris 9. Newer innovations, such as the Universal Serial Bus (USB), have only been recently supported. Solaris 9 for Intel runs very fast on modern Pentium-II and Pentium-III systems, meaning that Intel devotees now have a wider choice of operating system if they don’t want to buy Sun hardware. There was also a single port of Solaris to the PowerPC platform (with version 2.5.1), but this failed to impress MacOS users and was deprecated in Solaris 2.6.

Solaris for Intel users will require the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) to determine whether their particular system or their peripheral devices are supported. You can find this list at http://access1.sun.com/drivers/hcl/hcl.html. The HCL lists all tested systems, components, and peripherals that are known to work with Solaris for Intel. Chances are, if your hardware is not listed, it won’t be supported. However, many Intel-based standards have been adopted by Sun, including the PCI bus, which is now integrated in the desktop Ultra workstations.

Cross-Platform Interoperability
Solaris supports several different kinds of cross-platform interoperability. For example, Sun recently released a product called lxrun, which allows Linux binaries to be run under Solaris for Intel. This is very handy, as many database vendors, for example, have given away free versions of their database management products for Linux, but not for Solaris. Being able to exploit a free offer for one platform and make use of it on Solaris is a very handy cost saver indeed.

Sun also includes a binary compatibility package in Solaris that allows Solaris 1.x applications to run without modification. However, success can depend on whether the application is statically or dynamically linked. It is not clear whether binary compatibility will continue to be supported in future releases of Solaris.

Of course, the greatest hope for the interoperability of different operating systems lies with the Java programming language, developed by Sun. Starting life as the “Oak” project, Java promises a “write once, run anywhere” platform, which means that an application compiled on Windows NT, for example, can be copied to Solaris 9 and executed without modification and without recompilation. Even in the 1970s, when C was being implemented far and wide across different hardware platforms, it was often possible to transfer source and recompile it without modification, but binary compatibility was never achieved. The secret to Java’s success is the two-stage compile and interpretation process, which differs from many other development environments. Java source is compiled on the source platform to an intermediary bytecode format, which can then be transferred to any other platform and interpreted by a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Many software vendors, including SunSoft and Microsoft, have declared support for the Java platform, even though some vendors have failed to meet the specifications laid out by Sun. Until a standard is developed for Java, Sun will retain control over its direction, which is a risk for non-Solaris sites especially. However, Solaris 9 installations should have few qualms about integrating Java technology within their existing environments. With the release of free development tools, development in Java is becoming easier for C and experienced UNIX developers. For example, the Solaris Management Console, covered in Chapter 29, uses Java technology to build its interface, shown in Figure 1-2. Java is the best attempt yet at complete binary compatibility between operating systems and architectures.
Recent Solaris Innovations
Recent Solaris releases have contained many enhancements and new features compared to earlier versions, on both the client and server side—and specifically for administrators. For example, StarOffice is now included with the operating system distribution, as well as providing support for integration between personal organization applications and the new generation of “Palm computing” devices. On the server side, Solaris now ships with the Apache web server installed, and runs Linux applications through lxrun. Security is overhauled with the inclusion of Kerberos version 5, OpenSSH, and IPSec for both IPv4 and IPv6, which are also supported, making it easy to create virtual private networks through improved tunneling and encryption technologies. Developers will appreciate the inclusion of a Perl interpreter, other popular tools released under the GNU license, and the Java 2 SDK.

New Client Tools
Solaris has always been known as a server-based operating system. Its history and involvement with powering the Internet and providing a reliable platform for database servers and client/server applications are the characteristics that most administrators would associate with Solaris. However, Solaris 9 has brought about many improvements on the desktop as well, with further integration and support for standards-based, CDE-based applications (in contrast to the old proprietary OpenWindows system). Further support for multimedia is also provided, with facilities for MIDI audio and streamed video supporting many popular formats. CDE support for interfacing with productivity applications hosted on mobile computing devices, such as Palm, is also provided in conjunction with CDE.

Of course, the biggest desktop announcement of 1999 was Sun’s purchase of the StarOffice suite from Star Division, and their decision to both ship it for free to the general public and to include it as an integral part of Solaris 8. StarOffice is now distributed by Sun for a much cheaper price than equivalent office productivity suites. In addition, Sun is promoting the Sun Ray client as a cost-effective alternative to desktop computing based around legacy PC architectures, with clients centrally managed by a departmental server (such as an E450). This approach promises to revolutionize the way that many organizations currently (and often inconsistently) manage software updates, patches, and distribution.

Tip With the security and reliability of Solaris on the server side, the Solaris desktop will continue to see innovation in Solaris 9 and beyond.


StarOffice
StarOffice is a complete office productivity suite, including integrated word processing, spreadsheet, database, presentation, formula rendering, image processing, and web page design applications. A big advantage is the capability to import existing documents from office packages distributed by other vendors (including Microsoft Office products). The interoperability between StarOffice and competing products is also reflected in the cross-platform implementation of the product. In addition to running on Solaris, it is also available for OS/2, Linux, and Microsoft Windows computers. Reflecting its European roots, StarOffice natively supports many different languages, including Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

Creating a new “StarBase” database is easy: Just select the appropriate option from the menu, and a Database Design Wizard appears. Using a wizard makes creating a database very easy for novice users, and although the StarOffice database is not an industrial strength server, it is perfectly adequate for routine administrative tasks such as creating customer contact and product description tables.

StarOffice has some advantages over competing products. For example, it has the capability to render quite complex formulas through an innovative formula painter. You can simply select the appropriate function and enter the appropriate arguments. In addition, you can combine more than one predicate to form complex expressions. For example, you can construct a combined cubic root and exponential function expression in just a few keystrokes.

StarOffice also has the capability to design and publish web pages as new documents or to export existing documents. In fact, you can create an entire site by using the wizards that are supplied as part of the HTML editing package. The first web site wizard screen demonstrates the wide variety of templates available through the program.

Although StarOffice comes with complete online documentation and help, you can find further information regarding StarOffice at the StarOffice web center (http://www.sun.com/staroffice ).

Mobile Computing
The Solaris Operating Environment includes a number of enhancements to the common desktop environment (CDE). Personal digital assistant (PDA) support synchronizes data (using PDASync) from most Palm computing devices with the CDE textpad, calendar, mail, and address book. This enables Palm users to transfer data seamlessly between the desktop and the palmtop, previously a feature of traditionally desktop-oriented operating systems. PDASync is based around 3Com’s HotSync technology, making synchronization possible with a single click.

Sun has also released the “K” Java Virtual Machine (KVM), which will allow Java developers on Solaris to easily port their Java 2 applications to mobile computing platforms, including Palm. The KVM forms part of the Java 2 Micro Edition suite, and has a small memory and disk footprint (that is, less than 128K RAM). For further information regarding interoperability between Solaris and mobile computing devices using Java, see the KVM home page at http://java.sun.com/products/kvm/.

PC Support
Although Solaris 8 was coreleased for SPARC and Intel platforms at the same time, Sun has indicated that Solaris 9 for SPARC will be released on a different schedule than Solaris 9 for Intel. Thus, Intel users may need to wait before they can upgrade from Solaris 8 to Solaris 9. However, PC networks that require a reliable server system for web, database, file, and application serving can make use of proven Solaris reliability and high availability by using Solaris 9 on a SPARC server. In addition, Solaris for Intel provides a cost-effective alternative to SPARC hardware, and can act as a “drop-in” replacement for other server operating systems that also use Intel hardware. For example, the Samba software running on a Solaris server provides many key networking services to PCs, which are normally provided by NT server systems. These services include the following:

Primary and backup domain control, enabling centralized sharing of user and resource database for department-sized workgroups

Security and authentication using security identifiers for generating genuinely unique accounts

Support for legacy networking protocols, such as NetBIOS, and naming services such as WINS

NT file and print services

With the reliability and scalability of Solaris providing these basic network services for existing PC networks, many organizations are centralizing their server software around Solaris, because the same server can provide Samba services to PCs while performing other tasks (such as database serving).

There are several good reasons for using Solaris 9 as a server platform for PCs. First, viruses written for a PC platform are both physically and logically ineffective against Solaris, because the compiled code base is different for both operating systems. In addition, even if the same code base was shared (for example, a rogue Java application executed from a remote shell), the Solaris authentication and identification system does not permit unprivileged users to write to system areas, preventing any malicious damage from occurring to the server. Second, Solaris provides packet-filtering technology that prevents network intruders from browsing internal networks, whereas PCs may freely broadcast and exchange information between each other.

One of the most exciting innovations in the new collaborative technology that accompanies Solaris 9 is WebNFS, literally “network file serving” through the Web. WebNFS provides a standard file system for the World Wide Web, making it easy for users within the same building, or across the globe, to exchange data in a secure way, using industry standard clients. In fact, existing applications can be “webified” by gaining access to virtual remote file systems, by using an extension of Sun’s original NFS system.

Server Tools
As always, Sun has released a new batch of server-side products to improve on the existing functionality of Solaris. Of interest to those in the data center will be the new 3.0 release of Sun’s “Cluster” product, which offers high system availability through management of hardware redundancy. This offering caters largely to the corporate world, but developers who are more interested in championing open source technologies will also be pleased with the inclusion of lxrun, a platform for binary compatibility between Linux applications and the Solaris operating environment. Originally developed for UNIX systems distributed by the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), lxrun allows applications developed for Linux, and released with a binary-only code base, to be executed natively on the Solaris Intel platform without recompilation or modification. This will ultimately lead to a greater exchange of technology and ideas between Solaris and Linux users.

Clustering Technology
Increased performance is often gained by the use of hardware redundancy, which can be achieved on a file system-by-file system basis, by using a software solution, such as DiskSuite, or a hardware-based solution, such as an A1000 or T3 RAID appliance. This allows partitions to be actively mirrored so that in the event of a hardware failure, you can rapidly resume service restore missing data.

This approach is fine for single-server systems that do not require close to 100-percent uptime. However, for mission-critical applications, where the integrity of the whole server is at stake, it makes sense to invest in clustering technology. Quite simply, clusters are what the name suggests—groups of similar servers (or “nodes”) that have similar function, and that share responsibility for providing system and application services. Clustering is commonly found in the financial world, where downtime is measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars, and not in minutes. Large organizations need to undertake a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether clustering is an effective technology for their needs. However, Sun has made the transition to clustering easier by integrating the Cluster product with Solaris 9.

Solaris 9 ships with Cluster 3.0, which features a clustered virtual file system, and cluster-wide load balancing. For more information on introducing clustering technology using Sun Cluster 3.0, see Paul Korzeniowski’s technical article at http://www.sun.com/clusters/article/ .

lxrun
One of the advantages of Solaris for Intel over its SPARC companion is the greater interoperability between computers based on Intel architectures. This means that there is greater potential for cooperation between Linux, operating on Intel, and Solaris, also operating on Intel. This potential has been realized recently with the efforts of Steve Ginzburg and Solaris engineers, who developed lxrun, which remaps system calls embedded in Linux software binaries to those appropriate for the Solaris environment. This means that Linux binaries can run without recompilation or modification on Solaris. In some ways, lxrun is like the Java Virtual Machine in that Linux applications execute through a layer that separates the application from the operating system. This means that your favorite Linux applications are now directly available through Solaris, including the following:

KDE

Gnome

WordPerfect 7 and 8

Applix

Quake 2

GIMP

For more information on lxrun, see its home page at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~steven/lxrun/ .

Security Innovations
Security is a major concern for Solaris administrators. The Internet is rapidly expanding with the new IPv6 protocol set to completely supersede IPv4 sometime in the next few years. This will make many more addresses available for Internet hosts than are currently available. It also means that the number of crackers, thieves, and rogue users will also increase exponentially. Solaris 9 prepares your network for this “virtual onslaught” by embracing IPv6, not only for its autoconfiguration and network numbering features, but also because of the built-in security measures that form part of the protocol. In particular, authentication is a key issue after the many highly publicized IP-spoofing breaches reported in the popular press over the past few years. A second layer of authentication for internal networks and intranets is provided in Solaris 9 by the provision of Kerberos version 5 clients and daemons. Previous releases, such as Solaris 7, included support for Kerberos version 4 only. OpenSSH is a key development in the remote access arena.

Kerberos Version 5
Kerberos is the primary means of network authentication employed by many organizations to centralize authentication services. As a protocol, it is designed to provide strong authentication for client/server applications by using secret-key cryptography. Recall that Kerberos is designed to provide authentication to hosts inside and outside a firewall, as long as the appropriate realms have been created. The protocol requires a certificate granting and validation system based around “tickets,” which are distributed between clients and the server. A connection request from a client to a server takes a convoluted but secure route from a centralized authentication server before being forwarded to the target server. This ticket authorizes the client to request a specific service from a specific host, generally for a specific time period. A common analogy is a parking ticket machine that grants the drivers of motor vehicles permission to park on a particular street for one or two hours only.

Kerberos version 5 contains many enhancements over Kerberos version 4, including ticket renewal, removing some of the overhead involved in repetitive network requests. In addition, there is a pluggable authentication module, featuring support for RPC. The new version of Kerberos also provides both server- and user-level authentication, with a role-based access control feature that assigns access rights and permissions more stringently, ensuring system integrity. In addition to advances on the software front, Solaris 9 also provides integrated support for Kerberos and Smart card technology using the Open Card Framework (OCF) 1.1. More information concerning Kerberos is available from MIT at http://web.mit.edu/network/kerberos-form.html.

IPv6
IPv6, described in RFC 2471, is the replacement IP protocol for IPv4, which is currently deployed worldwide. The Internet relies on IP for negotiating many transport-related transactions on the Internet, including routing and the Domain Name Service. This means that host information is often stored locally (and inefficiently) at each network node. It is clearly important to establish a protocol that is more general in function, but more centralized for administration, and can deal with the expanding requirements of the Internet.

One of the growing areas of the Internet is obviously the number of hosts that need to be addressed; many subnets are already exhausted, and the situation is likely to get worse. In addition, every IP address needs to be manually allocated to each individual machine on the Internet, which makes the use of addresses within a subnet sparse and less than optimal. Clearly, there is a need for a degree of centralization when organizing IP addresses that can be handled through local administration, and through protocols like Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). However, one of the key improvements of IPv6 over IPv4 is its autoconfiguration capability, which makes it easier to configure entire subnets and to renumber existing hosts. In addition, security is now included at the IP level, making host-to-host authentication more efficient and reliable, even allowing for data encryption.

One way that this is achieved is by authentication header extensions: this allows a target host to determine whether a packet actually originates from a source host. This prevents common attacks, such as IP spoofing and denial of service, and reduces reliance on a third-party firewall by locking in security at the packet level. Tools are also included with Solaris 9 to assist with IPv4 to IPv6 migration.

What’s New in Solaris 9
Each new release of Solaris brings about changes at the client, server, and system level. These changes affect users, administrators, and developers in different ways. For example, Solaris 9 introduces a completely new multithreading library. This will affect users of multithreaded applications, such as Java servlets, by increasing response time and reducing errors. It will affect system administrators, who will need to update LD_LIBRARY_PATH variables and check the dependencies of existing libraries. It will also affect developers, who will need to recode some existing multithreaded applications as well as adjust to coding with a new API.

The following sections discuss products and services released for the first time with Solaris 9.

Resource Manager
The Resource Manager extends a number of existing tools that provide for monitoring and allocation of system resources to various tasks and services. This is particularly useful in high-end systems, where a large pool of resources can be allocated to specific processes. Although the existing nice command allows priorities to be set on specific processes, and prstat displays the resources used by each process, the Resource Manager is an integrated toolkit, featuring a scheduler, and accounting and billing tools. Again, although accounting tools are supplied as part of the standard Solaris toolkit, they have never been integrated with useful real-time monitoring tools. The Resource Manager also features a command-line interface and optional GUI for configuring and monitoring resource allocation and usage.

Linux Compatibility Tools
In addition to the lxrun binary execution environment for Solaris Intel, a number of libraries are now provided as part of the standard Solaris distribution to ensure that Linux applications can be linked and executed under Solaris. These libraries include glib, GTK+, JPEG, Tcl/Tk, libpng, libtif, and libxml12. These enhancements will improve interoperability between Linux and Solaris SPARC systems.

iPlanet Directory Server
The iPlanet Directory Server (iDS) is a commercial-grade LDAP solution for providing directory storage and access for hundreds and thousands of users. LDAP extends traditional Solaris directory service tools, such as NIS+, by using the standard LDAP protocol. iDS provides developers with C and Java APIs to create LDAP-compatible applications, so that they can maintain a single repository of authentication and identification data. In addition, iDS can be integrated with other iPlanet products, such as the proxy server, to ensure that Internet users have managed, rather than unfettered, access to the Internet during work hours.

Volume Manager
Although software RAID support has been previously provided in Solaris through Solstice Disk Suite (SDS), this product has now been superseded by Volume Manager (VM). VM supports RAID levels 0, 1, and 5, and allows a wide range of mirroring and striping facilities. Cross-grade and migration tools are also available to assist SDS users who are currently using metadevices as their primary virtual file systems for boot and nonboot disks and their associated slices.

Live Upgrade
Live Upgrade allows a Solaris system to continue running while components of its operating system are upgraded. This is particularly useful in production environments, where system downtime costs money and customers, particularly on shared platforms like the StarFire. A separate boot environment is constructed during runtime, after which the system is rebooted with the new configuration, thereby minimizing downtime.

Smaller Installation Footprint
In a move that defies the trend towards bloatware, Sun has actually reduced the size of the minimal installation, so that the system can be installed faster and with fewer of the optional features installed. This is particularly important where single- or limited-purpose servers are concerned, because they require only the base operating system packages, and one or two options that may be installed at a later time.

Virtual Memory Sizing
Improvements have been made in the processes used to allocate virtual memory by swapping to disk. The previous 8K limit has now been removed—basically, any page size that is supported by your hardware will be supported under Solaris. This means that memory-intensive applications should see improved performance, particularly where they used virtual memory to support their operations.

New Multithreading Library
Solaris provides advanced lightweight process support in the form of threads. Threads are used by multithreaded applications, such as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), to support many small parallel operations being performed simultaneously, without requiring the spawning of multiple processes. The new libthread supersedes previous versions, improving speed, and making the most of modern multitasking CPUs.

Internet Key Exchange (IKE)
Virtual private network (VPN) technology is also provided with Solaris 9, using IPSec. IPSec is compatible with both IPv4 and IPv6, making it easier to connect hosts using both new and existing networking protocols. IPSec consists of a combination of IP tunneling and encryption technologies to create sessions across the Internet that are as secure as possible. IP tunneling makes it difficult for unauthorized users (such as intruders) to access data being transmitted between two hosts on different sites. This is supported by encryption technologies and an improved method for exchanging keys, using the Internet key exchange (IKE) method. IKE facilitates interprotocol negotiation and selection during host-to-host transactions, ensuring data integrity. By implementing encryption at the IP layer, it will be even more difficult for rogue users to “pretend” to be a target host, intercepting data with authorization.

Open Secure Shell (OpenSSH)
Although secure shell (SSH) has been provided for several years at www.ssh.com for Solaris, Sun has finally released OpenSSH, which is integrated into Solaris 9. OpenSSH allows terminal sessions to be encrypted using public-key cryptography to ensure that packets exchanged across the network cannot be easily decrypted, even if they are intercepted by a hostile third party. OpenSSH is a vast improvement over traditional remote access tools, such as telnet, and all sites should now switch off telnet in favor of OpenSSH.

Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM)
Solaris provides WBEM tools to ease the administrative burden of managing multiple servers and networks in a production environment. WBEM tools make use of Internet protocols and data descriptors, like HTTP and XML, to ensure that networks and servers can be managed using a unified, single method.
Sources for Additional Information
In this chapter, we have so far examined the history of UNIX and what distinguishes UNIX systems from other operating systems. We have also traced the integration of both “flavors” of UNIX into the current Solaris 9 release. With the ever-rising popularity of Solaris 9, there are many web sites, mailing lists, and documentation sets that new and experienced users will find useful when trying to capitalize on an investment in Sun equipment or the latest Solaris 9 operating environment. In this section, we present some pointers to the main Internet sites where you can find reliable information about Solaris 9.

Sun Documentation/Sun Sites
Unlike some operating systems, Solaris 9 comes with a complete set of online reference manuals and user guides on the AnswerBook CD-ROM, which is distributed with all Solaris 9 releases (Intel and SPARC). The AnswerBooks are in PDF format, and cover a wide range of system administration topics, including the following:

Binary compatibility guide

JumpStart guide

Mail server guide

Naming services guide

NFS administration guide

NIS+ guide

SunShield security guide

System administration guides

TCP/IP guide

Troubleshooting guides

A set of user guides is also available on AnswerBook:

OpenWindows user guide

CDE user guide

CDE transition guide

Power management user guide

Developers will also be pleased with the AnswerBook coverage for development issues:

A 64-bit developer’s guide

Device drivers guide

Internationalization guide

SPARC assembly language guide (yes, it is still included for the adventurous)

STREAMS guide

Source compatibility guide

WebNFS developer’s guide

Hardware maintenance and technical staff will find the hardware reference guides invaluable.

The best thing about the AnswerBook series is that they are available for download and interactive searching through http://docs.sun.com/. This means that if you are working in the field and you need to consult a guide, you don’t need to carry around a CD-ROM or a printed manual. Just connect through the Internet and read the guide in HTML, or download and retrieve a PDF format chapter or two.

The two main Sun sites for Solaris 9 are at http://www.sun.com/solaris (for SPARC users) and http://www.sun.com/intel (for Intel users). Both of these pages contain internal and external links that will be useful in finding out more information about Solaris 9 and any current offerings. The Sun Developer Connection is a useful resource that users can join to obtain special pricing and to download many software components for free.

Web Sites
Many third-party web sites are also available that deal exclusively with Sun and Solaris 9. For example, if you are looking for a Solaris 9 FAQ, or pointers to Sun information, try the Sun Help site (http://www.sunhelp.org/). If it’s free precompiled software that you’re after, check the Sun Freeware site (http://www.sunfreeware.com/) or one of the many mirrors. Here you can find the GNU C compiler in a precompiled package (Sun dropped the compiler from Solaris 1.x to Solaris 8, leading to the most frequently asked question on many Solaris 9 forums: “Why doesn’t the Solaris C compiler work?”). For Solaris for Intel users, there is also an archive of precompiled binaries available at ftp://x86.cs.duke.edu/pub/solaris-x86/bins/.

In case you are interested in seeing what the pioneers of UNIX are doing these days, check out the home pages of these famous UNIX developers:

Brian Kernighan http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/bwk/index.html

Dennis Ritchie http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/index.html

Ken Thompson http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/

A list of Solaris resources for this book is maintained at www.cassowary.net/solaris.

USENET
USENET is a great resource for asking questions, finding answers, and contributing your skills and expertise to help others in need. This is not necessarily a selfless act—there will always be a Solaris 9 question that you can’t answer, and if you’ve helped others before, they will remember you. The comp.unix.solaris forum is the best USENET group for Solaris 9 information and discussion. The best source of practical Solaris 9 information is contained in the Solaris FAQ, maintained by the legendary Casper Dik. You can always find the latest version at http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2/. For Solaris for Intel users, there is the less formal alt.solaris.x86 forum, where you won’t be flamed for asking questions about dual booting with Microsoft Windows, or mentioning non-SPARC hardware. For Solaris Intel, the best FAQ is at http://sun.pmbc.com/faq/ . For both SPARC and Intel platforms, there is a comp.sys.sun.admin group that deals with system administration issues, which also has a FAQ available at ftp:// thor.ece.uc.edu/pub/sun-faq/FAQs.

Mailing Lists
Mailing lists are a good way of meeting colleagues and engaging in discussions in a threaded format. The Sun Manager’s List is the most famous Sun list, and contains questions, answers, and (most importantly) summaries of previous queries. All Solaris-related topics are covered. Details are available at ftp://ftp.cs.toronto.edu/pub/jdd/ sun-managers/faq. In addition, there is a Solaris for x86 mailing list archived at http://www.egroups.com/group/solarisonintel/, which has some great tips, tricks, and advice for those who are new to Solaris 9, or who are having difficulties with specific hardware configurations.
Solaris Certification Exams
Now that we’ve examined what Solaris is, we’ll look at the certification process for Solaris. The three exams we will cover in this book are

Sun Certified System Administrator for the Solaris 9 Operating Environment Part I (310-014)

Sun Certified System Administrator for the Solaris 9 Operating Environment Part II (310-015)

Sun Certified Network Administrator for the Solaris 9 Operating Environment Part II (310-016)

These exams were also available for Solaris 8 and previous releases. The exams will be referred to as Sysadmin I, Sysadmin II, and Network Admin throughout this book. It’s important to note that a pass on both Sysadmin I and Sysadmin II is required for full certification as a system administrator. These two exams are prerequisites for taking the Network Admin exam.

There are several ways to book a test. You must contact Sun Educational Services through one of the following ways and purchase a voucher:

Snail: UBRM12-175, 500 Eldorado Blvd., Broomfield, CO 80021

Phone: (800) 422-8020 or (303) 464-4097

Fax: (303) 464-4490

WWW: http://suned.sun.com/USA/certification/

Once you have a voucher for the test you wish to take, you need to contact a Prometric Test Center at a location convenient to you. You can register online with Prometric at http://www.2test.com/. Once you have attended the center and taken both Sysadmin I and Sysadmin II, you’ll be certified immediately as a system administrator if you have passed both exams. Of course, you don’t need to take them on the same day: it makes sense to attempt Sysadmin I and pass it before attempting Sysadmin II. Since Sysadmin I is a prerequisite for Sysadmin II, you won’t be able to book a sitting for Sysadmin II until your Sysadmin I results are certified. Once you have completed the two exams, and you have become a certified system administrator, you’ll need to take the Network Admin exam to become certified as a network administrator.

The current cost for attempting each exam is $150. Sysadmin I has 57 questions, comprising multiple choice, free response, and drag-and-drop types. You will need a score of at least 64 percent to pass the test, and you will only have 90 minutes in which to complete it. Sysadmin II has 58 questions, comprising multiple choice, free response, and drag-and-drop types. You will need a score of at least 65 percent to pass the test, and you will only have 90 minutes in which to complete it. Network Admin has 41 questions, comprising multiple choice, free response, and drag-and-drop types. You will need a score of at least 68 percent to pass the test, and you will only have 120 minutes in which to complete it.
Solaris Exam Preparation Courses
There are three preparation courses available for Solaris certification:

Solaris 9 System Administration I (SA-238)

Solaris 9 System Administration II (SA-288)

Solaris 9 Operating Environment TCP/IP Network Administration (SA-389)

Let’s examine what material is covered in each exam.

Fundamentals of Solaris 9 Operating Environment for System Administrators (SA-118)
If you’re completely new to Solaris, you may benefit from taking one or more of the exams that do not lead to a specific certification test. The Fundamentals of Solaris 9 Operating Environment for System Administrators (SA-118) is one such course. It is designed to endow up and coming administrators with basic UNIX skills, including the following:

Navigating the hierarchical file system

Setting file permissions

Using the vi visual editor

Using UNIX shells

Understanding Solaris network facilities

After completing the course, students should feel confident performing the following tasks:

Change settings in configuration files

Create new directories

Create new text files and edit existing files using vi

Identify and send signals to user processes

Move around mounted file systems

Set permissions on existing files

Use a shell to execute commands

Use the Common desktop environment (CDE)

Solaris 9 System Administration I (SA-238)
The SA-238 course aims to build a set of core skills required to administer stand-alone Solaris systems. Typically, these are the skills required to install and run a single Solaris system, including:

Management of disks, file systems, and partitions

Backup and restore techniques

User and group administration

Hardware device configuration

Process management and operations

The course lasts for five days and costs $2,495. After completing the course, newly skilled sysadmins should feel confident performing the following tasks:

Add users and groups to a system

Add new packages

Back up a system, and recover a lost file system

Change a system’s run level (init state)

Configure hardware devices

Control user and system processes

Manage system printing

Mount file systems

Patch existing packages

Recover damaged file systems using fsck

Review disk layout using format

Secure a system

Set up system-wide shell configurations

Shut down a system

Understand client/server architectures

Understand the root file system and the UNIX directory structure

Use eeprom to set boot parameters

Use file permissions to implement file security

The course consists of 17 different modules, including the following topics:

Module 1: Introduction to Solaris 9 Operating Environment Administration

Module 2: Adding Users

Module 3: System Security

Module 4: The Directory Hierarchy

Module 5: Device Configuration

Module 6: Disks, Slices, and Format

Module 7: Solaris ufs File Systems

Module 8: Mounting File Systems

Module 9: Maintaining File Systems

Module 10: Scheduled Process Control

Module 11: The Print Service

Module 12: The Boot PROM

Module 13: System Initialization of the boot process

Module 14: Installing the Solaris 9 Operating Environment on a Stand-alone System

Module 15: Installation of Software Packages

Module 16: Administration of Software Patches

Module 17: Backup and Recovery

Solaris 9 System Administration II (SA-288)
The SA-288 course aims to build a set of core skills required to administer networked Solaris systems. Typically, these are the skills required to install and run multiple Solaris systems, and Solaris networks. The course lasts for five days and costs $2,495. After completing the course, newly skilled network admins should feel confident performing the following tasks:

Centralize home directory access using the automounter

Configure the major naming services

Installation of multiple Solaris client systems using JumpStart

Installation of Solaris server systems

Manage systems remotely

Share disks using the Network File System (NFS) protocol

Use the system log facility

Using the admintool

Volume management

The course consists of 13 different modules, including the following topics:

Module 1: The Solaris 9 Network Environment

Module 2: Network Models

Module 3: Solaris syslog

Module 4: Introduction to Virtual Disk Management

Module 5: Introduction to Swap Space and Pseudo File Systems

Module 6: Configuring the NFS Environment

Module 7: CacheFS File Systems

Module 8: Using Automount

Module 9: Naming Services Overview

Module 10: NIS Configuration

Module 11: Solstice AdminSuite

Module 12: JumpStart

Module 13: System Administration Workshop

Solaris 9 Operating Environment TCP/IP Network Administration (SA-389)
The SA-389 course aims to build a set of core skills required to administer Solaris networks. Typically, these are the skills required to install and run networks that are based around Solaris systems. The course lasts for five days and costs $2,795. The course consists of 14 different modules, including the following topics:

Module 1: Network Models

Module 2: Introduction to Local Area Networks

Module 3: Ethernet Interface

Module 4: ARP and RARP

Module 5: Internet Layer

Module 6: Routing

Module 7: Transport Layer

Module 8 Client-Server Model

Module 9: DHCP

Module 10: Introduction to Network Management Tools

Module 11: Domain Name System

Module 12: Network Time Protocol (NTP)

Module 13: Network Troubleshooting

Module 14: IPv6