Solaris for Linux sysadmins

Last week, I started playing with Solaris. As a long-time Linux and Unix sysadmin, I have been in contact with Solaris before, but it has been quite a while since our last encounter.

Although I have touched Solaris before, these were only brief encounter. This time I decided to really get close. Sun and virtualization make this a lot easier than it was in the past. I downloaded Solaris 10 x86_64 from the Sun web site and installed it in a virtual machine. I will spare you the details of this installation, there are already sufficient resources available elsewhere and to be honest ... installation is not that hard.

What I want to write about, is a Solaris introduction for those already comfortable with Linux. So basically, I will highlight the main differences. This should allow Linux sysadmins to get quickly up to speed with Sun Solaris 10.

Let me start by giving you a summary of areas of interest:

• SMF
• Networking
  
• Disk partitioning + ZFS
• Resource Limits

With Solaris 10, Sun has done away with the traditional start/stop scripts in /etc/rc?.d/ directories. We all know this system has a few disadvantages:

• Scripts start one after the other, startup time could benefit from parallellism.
• No real dependencies between services. This means that although the network failed to start, eg the NFS server will still try to start.

Service Management Framework (SMF) in Solaris 10 fixes these shortcomings.