Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration: Fundamentals v. I

Initially I buy this book for about 100 pages of ZFS of Solaris 11.1. And I love the NFS chapter because it covers both ways of NFS shares in Solaris 11 GA and in Solaris 11.1. Then, I go though a whole book and figure out that this is the best book I can get for Solaris 11.1 system admin. I buy one copy for each member in the project team. My colleagues love it also. Strongly recommended! Hope the "advanced one" by the same author will publish soon.

While classic UNIX seems to be fading in favor of Linux, if you still use Solaris (Solaris 11.x), this book fills in the gaps where the Oracle manuals (while usually ok), aren't quite as clear. The SMF, ZFS, and networking were of particular interest to me and this book hit those targets pretty well. I still have Sun servers that were put into production in 2003 that are still humming along and doing what they need to do. We also have newer Sun equipment (M-series and T-series) that beat the pants off of their x86 counterparts. Especially when it comes to VM's. You just can't beat the Oracle VM's (zones) using VMWare. But, it does take competent administration on any system to keep peace amongst the user community. So, to fill in the gaps, this book was a big help.

Overall, the book was good for a transition from Solaris 10 or even Solaris 9 to the next generation of Solaris operating systems. For getting a system up and running and becoming familiar with it, this book will suffice. My interests extended beyond the scope of this book. Although zones were covered, there is a slim chance that I will use them so I glossed over this section. Maybe that is someone else's interest. My interest was the image packaging system, which was covered well. Then my interests reached into building a network server: installadm commands, creating services, DHCP, and building clients by Automated Installation over a network. It took a great deal of time referring to Oracle website postings to find the right commands. Finally, disaster backup and recovery using USB devices and Automated Install was not mentioned. Every competent System Administrator needs that training. For these advanced topics, the typical reader will have to spend a lot of time searching the Internet for bits and pieces of help. In the next revision of Solaris 11, I recommend those topics be included in step-by-step commands. For what I need, I compiled my own step-by-step document to be my primary instruction guide and will use the book for performance monitoring commands and maybe network filing system setups. This author's previous Solaris 8, 9, and 10 Administration Guides were much better at covering these topics.

Great reference book!

Didn't apply much to my specific tasks.

Interesting

Title - Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration ISBN-13 978-0-13-300710-7 Copyright 2013 Pearson Education Inc. Publisher - Prentice Hall Author Bill Calkins Summary - This is a very good System Administration guide for use by those new to Solaris. It does assume some knowledge and experience with Unix or Linux systems in general. I recommend this book for anyone actively using Solaris 11 and not only for those charged with Administering it. Ordinary users of Solaris 11 can benefit by knowing more about what is going on behind the scenes while System Administrators will have a handy guide and text as study preparations for the Solaris Certification exams. Review - This book is intended as a fairly comprehensive introduction to System Administration of the Oracle Solars 11 Operating Environment(OE). Calkins is quite experienced with the subject matter and has taught the material for several years and participated in the development of the Solaris Certification examinations. The book reflects this in a no nonsense approach that is concise and to the point. It is densely written and the tone is quite matter of fact. At 690 pages this volume is a handy desktop guide the Solaris 11 OE. It is also quite useful for developers or those managing their own desktop versions of this OE. The book begins with preparations for installation and then goes directly into the details of installing the OE using both the text mode and interactive live installer on both X86 and SPARC systems. Use of the Automated Installer is not covered. Subsequent chapters introduce managing and updating software using the Solaris IPS. IPS is a package management system as one would expect to find in a modern Unix or Linux operating system. Several features of IPS that deserve some mention are the Distribution Constructor and the Incorporation feature. Both of these are noted as appropriate for larger Enterprise level multiple installation situations. Calkins includes a chapter on booting the two different architectures in sufficient detail as to cover most situations. He also goes into the system logging aspects as a starting point for troubleshooting issues. This chapter also includes enough information regarding the System Management Facility(SMF) to get started using it. SMF is the Solaris utility that replaces the older Unix style init scripts. This is not overly comprehensive and only includes some basics of creating the SMF manifests. SMF is definitely an improvment over init scripts but as wth most things this comes at a price. Many hours of study time can be saved here in this section alone. SMF represents a better and more carefully engineered way to manage the systems processes. Follow on chapters describe in sufficient detail the Administration of Storage devices and chapter 5 is a good introduction to the Zettabyte File System ZFS. ZFS represents one of the most compelling arguments for utilizing Solaris. This chapter alone is about 100 pages of very detailed information and is invaluable for anyone that needs to deal with ZFS. Oracle has several volumes of guides on ZFS for more detailed information but this guide is sufficient as a detailed introduction. Chapter 6 describes the administration of Solaris Zones which is the preferred virtualization environment for Solaris 11. Other reviewers have noted the lack of coverage in this book on VirtualBox. Chapter 7 covers User and Security Administration. Again the security aspects of Solaris 11 make a compelling argument for the OE. The remaining 3 chapters include Managing System Processes, the Solaris 11 Network Environment and Network File Systems. Conclusion - Having used and Administered Solaris 11 on both SPARC and X86 machines I can fully appreciate the effort that has been put into this book and the detail that is so readily apparent. The information is presented in a very methodical and straightforward manner that reflects Calkins' experience teaching the subject matter for many years.

Much of what is included in this book can be found at the publicly available docs for Solaris from Oracle. There are some tips that Oracle's Solaris documentation do not cover. It is up to the reader to determine whether or not those tips are worth the cost of this book.

This book gives a good general presentation of Solaris 11. The layout is clear, and its late publication allowed the inclusion of some specific features of Solaris 11.1. It can be used to prepare the OCA/OCP exams, but would probably be incomplete in that aim. It does not target these exams anyway. First there are missing chapters for this, such as nothing on AI method of install. Also there is no self quiz that can be used as test, or examples of questions. I think that those who plan to try them, need to read the OCA exam guide from Michael Ernest. Even if this last one is also missing on some subjects for which a direct consultation of the Oracle online documentation is possible. I liked the progression of Ernest's book, with a long development on projects/tasks resource management, making it easier to introduce the concept of zones. But the book of Bill Calkins may be closer to the Oracle official documentation, and many small irritating mistakes (such as the number of possible secondary groups, or the definition of a ZFS dataset) are not there. In conclusion, these 2 books are interesting, and give a different overview of the system. The clear choice of Bill Calkins to forget about 1Z0-82x exams, makes it better for those who don't care about certification.

Ottimo testo, approfondito e utile. Illumos/Solaris offre questo punto di forza (tra molti altri): la documentazione. Questo manuale è un eccellente testo per il sistema operativo Solaris e Illumos. Magari ce ne fossero così per i vari *BSD.

I've always been a fan of Calkins's books, and I couldn't wait for the new Solaris book to be published. His books are great for certification preparation, and I don't think I would have passed my exams without his help. Having said this, while I was reading the book, I had a couple of deja-vus... I checked my old Solaris 10 books and, with great surprise, entire paragraphs were practically copied and pasted from the previous books. In some cases even the examples were identical to the old book. Many things have remained the same in Solaris 11, so I don't expect main subjects to change, but if you're publishing (and selling) a NEW book, you should put NEW contents. If not, you're just ripping people off.