Sun.com: Hidden Treasures
Confession... we're not sure exactly how many pages there are on the sun.com sites. We think it's something like 2.5 million... the search crawler indexes almost 2 million, and we figure we're missing a half million or more that just get skipped, or are password protected, or entitled, or whatever.
Anyway, that's a lot of stuff, and despite our best efforts to tie things together through a navigable 'information architecture' it's inevitable that some great stuff will be a bit hard to find. Here are a few favorite things that you might (or might not) know about, focusing this time on documentation, specs, parts:, and trade-ins
Sun System Handbook - Useful for supporting hardware, looking up parts, and also reviewing very detailed specs before you buy a system (such as footprint and power requirements). For eons, the Sun System Handbook was the prized private possession of online bible of only field engineers but regular folks couldn't get ahold of it. Now it's available online and free on the SunSolve site.
docs.sun.com - This site contains
almost all system and software documentation at Sun (but also see below
for some other pointers).
Sun Blueprints
Online - Excellent in-depth online articles (some of them are
almost book-length!) from Sun's technical experts, covering a wide
range of technical topics. Recent articles included technical overviews
of Solaris Availability features, doing Jumpstart installs without a
local boot server, Open SSH, maximizing performance on Gigabit
Ethernet NIC, etc.
BTW, the Sun.com Documentation page has links to these areas above and many more, all consolidated in one place. And, there's more detailed information than you might expect on the even Sun product pages' 'specification' and 'detailed view' areas that are available for most products. And, I assume most people are intimately familiar already with SunSolve, which focuses on support knowledge, patches and related info and has a rich assortment of "documentation like" entries.
You can search all documentation at once across all most of these venues using the new sun.com search, and there's a Documentation tab in the search results to make it easy to screen documentation.
Enough for now... there are a lot of other interesting areas of Sun sites to be summarized in future postings.
