SCSA I Solaris 10

Ahh, users.. can’t live with them.. can’t live without… anyway, users on a Solaris system are important not only because they give humans an identity on the system, but also because all files and processes are owned by a specific user. Administering users and their initialization files has a great impact on system operation.

Explain and perform Solaris 10 OS user administration, and manage user accounts and initialization files.

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Solaris 10 includes the greatest changes in service management perhaps in the history of Solaris. The new Service Management Facilify (SMF) handles process startup, stopping, monitoring, and restarting, although the old legacy techniques of runtime control scripts still work. For the first few minutes, you may ask yourself why they did this to you, how could they, what mean people. After a few minutes, you’re more likely to come up with a song to sing in honor of your new friend, svccfg. Read the rest of this entry »

Explain the Service Management Facility and the phases of the boot process.

The Service Management Facility (SMF) in Solaris 10 is a huge improvement over the old means of starting and stopping services or applications. Read the rest of this entry »

Perform system boot and shutdown procedures, including identifying the system’s boot device, creating and removing custom device aliases, viewing and changing NVRAM parameters, and interrupting an unresponsive system.

Bringing up the topics of shutting down or rebooting a Solaris box can stir controversy. To shut down a Solairs system, you can use either shutdown or init, either will perform a clean shutdown. The shutdown command eventually calls init to do the actual shutting down, but shutdown warns users before the shutdown occurs. Read the rest of this entry »

Use the Xorg configuration files or kdmconfig utility to configure the keyboard, display, and mouse devices for an x64 and x86 based system.

The /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (see its man page for the nitty gritty details) contains the configuration for keyboard, mouse, and display, in addition to several other devices. Read the rest of this entry »

Execute basic boot PROM commands for a SPARC system.

A previous objective described the boot PROM and its use. The boot PROM has a ton of commands Read the rest of this entry »

Solaris running on an x86 or x64 platform generally only differs from the SPARC platform only in its interaction with the hardware, as with the boot process and low-level system configuration.

Given a scenario, explain the BIOS settings for booting, abort sequence, and displaying POST, including BIOS configuration for x64 and x86-based system.

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Sun’s SPARC platforms employs the OpenBoot architecture for accessing low-level boot PROM system configuration inforamation, similar to the BIOS of an Intel x86 system. Other low-level concepts covered in this objective include NVRAM (nonvolitile RAM), POST (power on self test), and the boot abort sequence.

Given a scenario, explain boot PROM fundamentals, including OpenBoot Architecture Standard, boot PROM, NVRAM, POST, Abort Sequence, and displaying POST to serial port for SPARC.

Knowing how to handle low-level system configuration is a must for a system administrator. Read the rest of this entry »

Most formal applications for Solaris are delivered in one or more packages. In fact, all of the software that makes up the Solaris operating environment is installed in packages. Once installed, software packages can be updated with fixes or upgrades with patches.

Perform Solaris 10 OS package administration using command-line interface commands and manage software patches for the Solaris OS, including preparing for patch administration, and installing and removing patches using the patchadd and patchrm commands.

The use of packages and patches simplifies application management Read the rest of this entry »

Solaris automatically mounts some filesystems during the boot process, and the volume management system mounts CD-ROMs for you, normally. There are times when you need to manually perform these tasks:

Perform mounts and unmounts on a Solaris 10 OS file system, and use volume management to access mounted diskettes and CD-ROMs, restrict access, troubleshoot volume management problems, and explain access methods without volume management.

Mounting a UFS filesystem is straightforward. Unmounting a filesystem can be trickier Read the rest of this entry »