Solaris System Admininstration Part 1

Overview
This course teaches the fundamental skills required to administer a Solaris system. As most administration is performed at the command line (as opposed to using graphical tools) the course covers command line tools, scripting and utilities, before discussing key administrative tasks including file system management, user and group management, system logging, filesystem backup, booting, system documentation, and printer management.

Key Skills
After completion of this course you will be able to:

• Use the shell and key Solaris utilities
• Create and maintain Solaris file systems
• Control how a Solaris systems boots
• Find and understand the documentation you need
• Manage user accounts and groups
• Perform day-to-day administration

Practical Work
Extensive hands-on exercises throughout the course provide opportunity to configure and manage a Linux system in a safe, guided environment. Exercises include:

• Adding new partitions and file systems
• Creating user accounts and groups
• Configuring system logging
• Post-processing log files with text filters
• Configuring boot-time actions

Course Contents
Working at the Command Line

• Using the shell
• Managing files and directories
• Processing text with filter programs
• Using pipes and redirecting I/O streams
• Searching files using regular expressions
• Managing processes

Configuring and Managing the File System

• A tour of the file system organisation
• Partitioning disks
• Creating device nodes - drvconfing
• Creating file systems - newfs/mkfs
• Solaris disknaming conventions - physical and logical names
• Checking file system integrity with fsck
• monitoring disk usage - df and du
• Manual and boot-time mounting of file systems
• Controlling disk quotas
• Manage file access permissions and ownership
• Using hard links and symbolic links
• Automating installation with Jumpstart
• Creating DOS filesystems with fdformat

Editing and Scripting

• Learning to love vi
• Creating simple shell scripts
• Using variables, arguments, and I/O in scripts
• Looping and branching in scripts
• Shell startup scripts

Booting and Shutting Down

• Configuring the boot loader
• Changing run levels
• Configuring run levels via inittab
• Performing a clean shutdown and reboot

Solaris Documentation

• Finding and interpreting the man pages
• Locating documentation on the Internet

Core Administrative Tasks

• Managing user accounts and groups - with useradd and admintool
• Customising the user environment - understanding login and startup files
• Configuring and monitoring system log files
• Scheduling jobs with at and cron
• Backing up the file system - ufsdump/ufsrestore, dd, tar, cpio, Solstice backup

Printers and Printing

• Creating, monitoring and managing print queues (lpsched, lpadmin, admintool)
• Printing files - associating files with print queues
• Installing local and remote printers

File sharing

• Understanding and configuring NFS
• NIS and NIS+
• Understanding automounting and setting up the automounter

Basics of Networking

• Network interface configuring
• Configuring internet access
• Remote commands - rsh, rcp and rlogin
• Trust relationships and the remote commands
• Basics of name resolution and DNS