About This Book

System Administration Guide, Volume I is part of a two-volume set that covers a significant part of the Solaris^TM system administration information. It includes both SPARC^TM and x86 information and describes how to use the Solstice^TM AdminSuite^TM tools to perform some of the system administration tasks.

This book assumes that you have already installed the SunOS 5.7^TM operating system and Solstice AdminSuite, and you have set up any networking software that you plan to use. The SunOS 5.7 operating system is part of the Solaris 7 product family, which also includes many utilities and OpenWindows(TM) Version 3. The SunOS 5.7 operating system is compliant with AT&T's System V, Release 4 operating system.

For the Solaris 7 release, new features interesting to system administrators are covered in sections called What's New in ... ? in the appropriate chapters.

The term "x86" refers to the Intel 8086 family of microprocessor chips, including the Pentium and Pentium Pro processors and compatible microprocessor chips made by AMD and Cynix. In this document the term "x86" refers to the overall platform architecture, whereas "Intel Platform Edition" appears in the product name.

The following table describes the system administration topics found in System Administration Guide, Volume I and System Administration Guide, Volume II.

Who Should Use This Book

This book is intended for anyone responsible for administering one or more systems running the Solaris 7 release. To use this book, you should have 1-2 years of UNIX® system administration experience and preferably a Computer Science B.S. degree or equivalent knowledge.

How This Book Is Organized

This book is split into parts that each cover a major system administration topic. Each part contains chapters that provide both overview and task information.

Most of the overview information about a topic is usually described in the beginning chapters of each part, and the other chapters provide step-by-step instructions on system administration tasks that you need to perform. Each set of steps is usually followed by a way to verify that the task was successfully performed and an example of how to perform the task.

Using AnswerBook2^TM to Read This Book

You can click on any cross reference, represented by underlined text, to quickly access referenced information in the AnswerBook2 collections. To return to the previous display, click on Back.

Ordering Sun Documents

The SunDocs^TM program provides more than 250 manuals from Sun Microsystems, Inc. If you live in the United States, Canada, Europe, or Japan, you can purchase documentation sets or individual manuals using this program.

For a list of documents and how to order them, see the catalog section of the SunExpress^SM Internet site at sunexpress.

SPARC and x86 Information

This book provides system administration information for both SPARC and x86 systems. Unless otherwise noted, information throughout this book applies to both types of systems. Table P-1 summarizes the differences between the SPARC and x86 system administration tasks.

What Typographic Changes Mean

The following table describes the typographic changes used in this book.

machine_name% You have mail.

machine_name% su

Password:

Shell Prompts in Command Examples

The following table shows the default system prompt and superuser (root) prompt for the Bourne shell and Korn shell.

General Conventions

Be aware of the following conventions used in this book.

• When following steps or using examples, be sure to type double-quotes ("), left single-quotes (`), and right single-quotes (') exactly as shown.

• The key referred to as Return is labeled Enter on some keyboards.

• It is assumed that the root path includes the /sbin, /usr/sbin, /usr/bin, and /etc directories, so the steps in this book show the commands in these directories without absolute path names. Steps that use commands in other, less common, directories show the absolute path in the example.

• The examples in this book are for a basic SunOS 5.7 software installation without the Binary Compatibility Package installed and without /usr/ucb in the path.

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  Caution -

  If /usr/ucb is included in a search path, it should always be at the end of the search path. Commands like ps or df are duplicated in /usr/ucb with different formats and options from the SunOS 5.7 commands.

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