Solaris Information Channel

Sun's binary distribution of the OpenSolaris operating system debuts today as OpenSolaris 2008.05.

This particular distribution of the OpenSolaris software is the culmination of the open-source Project Indiana that has been a part of opensolaris.org for close to a year. This distribution of OpenSolaris integrates several current projects on opensolaris.org, including:

* those to make the installation experience easier

* those to modernize the look and feel of OpenSolaris on the desktop

* those to introduce a network-based package management system into OpenSolaris

Documentation and other information about OpenSolaris 2008.05 abounds on opensolaris.org. The central location is the documentation page. The best place to start there is with the Getting Started Guide. The Getting Started Guide will step you through the installation for your particular system, whether you are running a Windows, Linux, or Apple's OS X operating system. Of course you can install OpenSolaris 2008.05 as a standalone operating system on practically any Intel-based or AMD-based machine.

An additional option is to use the new Innotek Virtual Box from Sun and install OpenSolaris 2008.05 in a Virtual Box partition.

Once you get started installing OpenSolaris 2008.05, you'll want to know about the new IPS packaging system that enables you to download components to add to your newly installed OpenSolaris 2008.05 operating system. There is a great demo and a list of HowTo procedures on using this new network-based package manager.

The OpenSolaris documentation page also gives you links to all the great books and information sources for developers, users, and system administrators covering topics such as ZFS, DTrace, virtualization, and security. The complete list of books is available at the Current Documentation page on opensolaris.org.

Too busy to blog? I must be doing something wrong. It's been almost two months, way too long. But I finally just got knocked over by the flood of Solaris stuff coming through the pipeline. Look at all this great information.

A number of cool things came out with the latest Solaris Express Developer Edition (1/08).

There is a new printing guide covering important new features in Solaris printing:

Support for Automatic Printer Discovery and Configuration in the GNOME Desktop Environment

Changed Privilege Requirements for Using Solaris Print Commands

PPD File Management Utility for administering PostScriptTM Printer Description (PPD) files that are used with the Solaris print subsystem

Microsoft interoperability: Solaris now supports the CIFS service and has a new guide devoted to interoperability with Microsoft.

A Solaris server can now be an active participant in a Windows active directory domain and provide ubiquitous, cross-protocol file sharing through CIFS and NFS to clients in their native dialect.

Solaris now includes Sun xVM Hypervisor, a new virtualization feature based on an open source project, Xen. See Part IV in the newly retitled System Administration Guide: Virtualization Using the Solaris Operating System

The Solaris Trusted Extensions Administrator's Procedures contains the following new procedures and examples:

Add Trusted Extensions labels to a Solaris system by enabling the labeld service, then rebooting.

Add a ZFS dataset to a labeled zone.

Every labeled zone can have its own nscd daemon.

NFSv3 recognizes multilevel mounts.

The Domain of Interpretation (DOI) is configurable.

In this task, there's an example: Creating a Security Template With a Different DOI Value

BigAdmin has a host of new articles, many submitted by the community of Solaris system administrators. These articles augment Sun's customer documentation or covers topics that aren't covered in quite this way in the documentation. All are worth reading.

Guidelines for Using Solaris Live Upgrade With Solaris Zones

Volume Management Within Solaris Zones

Impact of Swap Space on System Performance for the Solaris 9 and 10 OS

Tweak to XPerts transcript on Patching

Script for Checking Used Space in File Systems in the Solaris OS

Updates: Scripts for Automating System Checks

From another source, here are three tutorials on Solaris security features:

Auditing

BART

RBAC and Privileges

Lots of people were working hard in the lead-up to the holidays, so I've got quite a bag full of new Solaris information.

I think the coolest thing is the new wiki version of the Solaris DTrace Guide. This is the same book published on docs.sun.com, but you can now share your DTrace knowledge by adding to the wiki version.

Speaking of wikis, Solaris Cluster has a great new wiki. It serves as an information center for Solaris Cluster and has lots of good stuff there already. You can add information and share what you know about using Solaris Cluster.

BigAdmin has a new virtualization site covering all Sun's virtualization technologies like Zones/Containers, LDOMS, and xVM hypervisor. This is a very rich site with information on:

* Server virtualization

* OS virtualization

* Storage virtualization

* Desktop virtualization

* Application virtualization

* Network virtualization

Big news for Solaris this week are the InfoWeek awards. One for ZFS and another for Solaris 10.

InfoWeek says of Solaris 10 that "No server operating system satisfies more varied requirements or boasts a wider range of brilliant features."

Of ZFS, InfoWeek says, "It's not every day that the computer industry delivers the level of innovation found in Sun's ZFS. The fluidity, the malleability, and the scalability of ZFS far surpass any file system available now on any platform."

There are a bunch of other worthwhile new stuff: articles, blogs, and updated web sites. It's a hefty list. Like I said, people have been busy.

Patch updates

Dan Anderson's blog on upgrading a Linux server to OpenSolaris

Tech Tip about what to do when there is no login window after installing Solaris 10

A Script Template and Useful Techniques for ksh Scripts

Solaris for x86 Installation Check Tool 1.3

Scripts for Backing Up and Restoring ZFS File Systems in Solaris 10

Quickstart Guide for the Solaris Management Facility (SMF)

Rich Teer's article on user authentication with the PAM Service Modules

Finally, a new site I just discovered: solariscentral.com

A new FAQ on Trusted Extension is out now. This is different from the Trusted Extensions FAQ published at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/faq.jsp. The new FAQ answers technical questions about Trusted Extensions. There you'll find answers to questions such as:

Why does remote login in a labeled zone fail?

How do I load LDAP server software?

You can also add to this FAQ through its associated wiki

Another great source of information about Trusted Extensions is Glenn Faden's blog.

In the upcoming Solaris Express Developer Edition, Trusted Extensions is a service. The ExtraValue directory that is described on the OpenSolaris Trusted Extensions Project page is going away - Trusted Extensions is now installed when Solaris is installed. After you enable Trusted Extensions by using the svcadm enable -s labeld command, rebooting and further configuration is required. Download the OpenSolaris documentation for details.

Other new articles I noticed today:

Automating Unmirror and Remirror for Solaris Volume Manager Volumes (with script).

Achieving Near-Linear Scalability Using Solaris OS on NUMA Architectures

The BigAdmin Newsletter came out last week. Subscribing to that is another good way to get information about Solaris. Here is a list of the Solaris-related information in this month's Newsletter:

Project Brussels: A Uniform Interface to Administer NICs

Need to Run Different Solaris Versions on One Machine?

Diskless Setup for the Solaris OS on x86 Platforms

Q&A on the new Solaris 8 Migration Assistant

FAQ: Solaris OS on IBM Servers

Plus a couple of goodies on Solaris ZFS:

Sun's ZFS is Close to Perfect, but Widely Misunderstood

A Conversation with Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore: The Future of File Systems

BigAdmin just announced a new Ask the Experts session on the topic of patching Solaris. These Expert sessions give you the chance to ask questions about the topic directly to people at Sun best qualified to answer them. See XPerts Session.

BTW, there are transcripts at the site for previous Ask the Expert sessions.

While we're on the subject of BigAdmin, there are several information hubs there with Solaris information. One is the Solaris Information Center. There is also the Solaris Cluster hub.

The biggest news on BigAdmin as far as Solaris is concerned is the new Patching hub.

Other high points that you'll also see on BigAdmin is documentation for the newly released Solaris 8 Migration Assistant, The Management of NFS Performance with Solaris ZFS, and the Solaris Trusted Extensions FAQ.

One last thing, if you have anything you'd like me to post here, leave a comment.

There is a derogatory description of the editorial practices for many local news programs: "If it bleeds, it leads." Well, there is no gore here on this news channel, but maybe some bleeding, as in "bleeding edge." You can be the judge.

First of all, let me call your attention to the new BigAdmin Wiki. This is just getting started. There is great potential, and already there are some really good entries. Check out the article on Enabling Browsing with Samba under New and Recently Updated.

The Storage group has opened a whole product hub as a wiki and it is starting to take off.

If you want to compare a live ZFS file system against a ZFS snapshot of the same file system, this perl script can do that.

There is a very good new article on the PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) API with a sample program. This is actually the third article in a series by this author.

In September we released a new update to Solaris 10 (Solaris 10 8/07) and a new version of the popular Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE 9/07).

One last thing. If you haven't been to docs.sun.com for a few months, you probably haven't seen the greatly improved performance or the new search engine. Both are remarkable upgrades. On top of that, links on docs.sun.com are now much more persistent, so if you bookmark a specific page, you can count on it being there for a long time. No more frequent, unpredictable URL changes. Note that not all of the URLs have been changed, but any new sections should use the new URLs.

Interest in Solaris is growing so fast these days, and so much is being written about it. Here at Sun, we are publishing more information than ever before. Or perhaps I should say, we "purvey" more information. Some of it is traditional product documentation and articles that the Solaris technical writers author on special topics. Significantly, a lot of the new content is provided by the Solaris user community. On BigAdmin and the Sun Developer Network (SDN), the majority of contributions come from people outside Sun Microsystems. We are so pleased that a lot of content is coming from the user community.

And so much of the content comes in new forms, ala Web 2.0. There are FAQs and Best Practices open to anyone who wants to contribute. Many of these are wikis. There are blogs and videos. I feel like we are just providing the space for people to write, to purvey what they know about Solaris.

Then there is OpenSolaris.org. There are many communities with discussion lists and other forms of exchange. For example, the Documentation community has a wiki for collecting HowTo's, procedures for how to do things aren't written down anywhere else.

This blog will give you a place to go to get the latest stuff--books, articles, wiki entries, videos, training, blogs, and whatever else people dream up.

If there is good stuff that I neglect to include, please add a comment with the pointer. I want my blog to help people keep up with the latest information about Solaris, but even I probably can't keep up with all of it. Your help will be appreciated by all.