About This Book

System Administration Guide: Basic Administration is part of a set that includes a significant part of the Solaris^TM system administration information. This guide contains information for both SPARC® based and x86 based systems.

This book assumes you have completed the following tasks:

Installed the Solaris Express Operating System
Set up all the networking software that you plan to use

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

Note –

This Solaris release supports systems that use the SPARC and x86 families of processor architectures: UltraSPARC®, SPARC64, AMD64, Pentium, and Xeon EM64T. The supported systems appear in the Solaris OS: Hardware Compatibility Lists at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl. This document cites any implementation differences between the platform types.

In this document these x86 related terms mean the following:

“x86” refers to the larger family of 64-bit and 32-bit x86 compatible products.
“x64” points out specific 64-bit information about AMD64 or EM64T systems.
“32-bit x86” points out specific 32-bit information about x86 based systems.

For supported systems, see the Solaris OS: Hardware Compatibility Lists.

Who Should Use This Book

This book is intended for anyone responsible for administering one or more systems running the Solaris release. To use this book, you should have 1-2 years of UNIX® system administration experience. Attending UNIX system administration training courses might be helpful.

How the System Administration Guides Are Organized

Here is a list of the topics that are covered by the System Administration Guides.

Book Title	Topics
System Administration Guide: Basic Administration	User accounts and groups, server and client support, shutting down and booting a system, managing services, and managing software (packages and patches)
System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration	Terminals and modems, system resources (disk quotas, accounting, and crontabs), system processes, and troubleshooting Solaris software problems
System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems	Removable media, disks and devices, file systems, and backing up and restoring data
System Administration Guide: IP Services	TCP/IP network administration, IPv4 and IPv6 address administration, DHCP, IPsec, IKE, Solaris IP filter, Mobile IP, IP network multipathing (IPMP), and IPQoS
System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (DNS, NIS, and LDAP)	DNS, NIS, and LDAP naming and directory services, including transitioning from NIS to LDAP and transitioning from NIS+ to LDAP
System Administration Guide: Naming and Directory Services (NIS+)	NIS+ naming and directory services
System Administration Guide: Network Interfaces and Network Virtualization	Networking stack, NIC driver property configuration, network interface configuration, administration of VLANs and link aggregations, configuring WiFi wireless networking.
System Administration Guide: Network Services	Web cache servers, time-related services, network file systems (NFS and Autofs), mail, SLP, and PPP
System Administration Guide: Solaris Printing	Solaris printing topics and tasks, using services, tools, protocols, and technologies to set up and administer printing services and printers
System Administration Guide: Security Services	Auditing, device management, file security, BART, Kerberos services, PAM, Solaris Cryptographic Framework, privileges, RBAC, SASL, and Solaris Secure Shell
System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System	Resource management features, which enable you to control how applications use available system resources; zones software partitioning technology, which virtualizes operating system services to create an isolated environment for running applications; and virtualization using Sun^TM xVM hypervisor technology, which supports multiple operating system instances simultaneously
Solaris CIFS Administration Guide	Solaris CIFS service, which enables you to configure a Solaris system to make CIFS shares available to CIFS clients; and native identity mapping services, which enables you to map user and group identities between Solaris systems and Windows systems
Solaris Trusted Extensions Administrator’s Procedures	System installation, configuration, and administration that is specific to Solaris Trusted Extensions
Solaris ZFS Administration Guide	ZFS storage pool and file system creation and management, snapshots, clones, backups, using access control lists (ACLs) to protect ZFS files, using ZFS on a Solaris system with zones installed, emulated volumes, and troubleshooting and data recovery

Related Third-Party Web Site References

Note –

Sun is not responsible for the availability of third-party web sites mentioned in this document. Sun does not endorse and is not responsible or liable for any content, advertising, products, or other materials that are available on or through such sites or resources. Sun will not be responsible or liable for any actual or alleged damage or loss caused by or in connection with the use of or reliance on any such content, goods, or services that are available on or through such sites or resources.

Documentation, Support, and Training

The Sun web site provides information about the following additional resources:

Typographic Conventions

The following table describes the typographic conventions that are used in this book.

Table P–1 Typographic Conventions


Typeface	Meaning	Example
`AaBbCc123`	The names of commands, files, and directories, and onscreen computer output	Edit your `.login` file. Use `ls -a` to list all files. `machine_name% you have mail.`
`AaBbCc123`	What you type, contrasted with onscreen computer output	`machine_name%` `su` `Password:`
`aabbcc123`	Placeholder: replace with a real name or value	The command to remove a file is `rm` `filename`.
AaBbCc123	Book titles, new terms, and terms to be emphasized	Read Chapter 6 in the User's Guide. A cache is a copy that is stored locally. Do not save the file. Note: Some emphasized items appear bold online.

Shell Prompts in Command Examples

The following table shows the default UNIX system prompt and superuser prompt for the C shell, Bourne shell, and Korn shell.

Table P–2 Shell Prompts


Shell	Prompt
C shell	`machine_name%`
C shell for superuser	`machine_name#`
Bourne shell and Korn shell	`$`
Bourne shell and Korn shell for superuser	`#`

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

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 commands.