The objective of this course is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the administrative aspects of the Solaris operating system. At the end of the course delegates will have the skills required to administer a Solaris system, including user management, disk management, backing up procedures, startup and shutdown procedures, and process management.

Delegates should be competent in the skills covered by the PTR Unix Fundamentals and PTR Shell Programming courses.

Topics covered on the 4 day Solaris System Administration course

Solaris Installation Process

Software & Patch Administration

• Adding software packages with pkgadd
• Rremoving software packages with pkgrm
• Patches

Solaris System Administration

• A few simple rules
• Where to get help
• Graphical Administration with admintool

Starting Up & Shutting Down

• The Solaris boot process
• Power on
• Kernel processes
• Solaris run levels
• Initialisation process
• Booting to single user mode
• Run control directories, Run control scripts
• Changing run levels, Customising run levels
• BootPROM, BootPROM commands
• NVRAM parameters

User Management

• /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group
• Useradd
• groupadd
• The user's home
• Checking passwd and group files
• The shells
• Customising user environments-initialisation scripts
• Default initialisation scripts
• Passwords
• Removing users

System Security

• Password Ageing
• Login control with /etc/default/login
• Switching users with su
• Standard file & directory permissions
• Special permissions

Process Management

• Processes overview
• Killing application processes
• Process scheduling
• Changing process priorities
• Multi-processor systems

Disk Management

• Disk label, disk geometry, disk layout
• Partitioning with format
• Device files
• Logical device names
• RAID
• Physical device names
• Kernel instance names
• Rebuilding device names
• Solaris file systems
• The ufs filesystem
• I-nodes
• Creating a file system with newfs
• Mounting a filesystems, Unmounting a file system
• Mounting at boot time
• File system corruption
• File system checking with fsck
• CDROM file systems, NFS file systems, RAM based file systems
• Swap management, swap devices
• Virtual swap

Backing Up

• Why backup?
• Backup media, Backup types
• Backing Up with tar
• Image copying with dd
• Backing up with cpio, Backing up with ufsdump

Solaris Printing

• User commands
• The scheduler
• Adding a local printer
• The print queue

   (excl.VAT)