Customer Reviews

Solaris 10 System Administration Essentials

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I was hoping this would be a new era of literature published by or in cooperation with Sun, a rebirth if you will. My expectations had been a little high as I anxiously awaited this book. Upon reading it I was greatly disappointed by the shallow level of the content. In all fairness I could imagine it's hard to cover all of the wicked cool useful pieces within Solaris 10 while still keeping it to one book (under 1000 pages). However this book basically read like a reference to what man pages you should read for more information without really getting into much detail.

If you want something to actually give you applicable skills in a certain Solaris 10 topic get the Bill Calkins exam prep books and read the sections your interested in. You'll walk away with more skills and understanding.

As a die hard Solaris user/advocate for the past 15 years I'm still puzzled why the Sun training and published books are so technically shallow. It would be nice to see something between the reference material located in [...] and the in depth articles that come out as "blueprints", and niche articles in bigadmin.

Derek

I purchased this book and Solaris 10 Security Essentials together, in part because they were authored by Sun's engineers, as the books state. I teach these topics, and I'm always on the lookout for better presentations or demonstrations that would improve my delivery and deepen my own understanding.

There are, alas, mostly off-putting elements in this book. I don't know what I had in mind for "Solaris System Engineers" as the authors, but it sure wasn't technical writers, who compose about half the group. Accordingly, some discussions seem re-phrased from a man page or [...] material, and not improved upon either. In other places, the technical information is laid out in about the least imaginative or helpful way I can conjure. Turning data structure elements into bullet points (see Chapter 6, "Managing System Processes"), then tabling a bunch of commands and showing one simple example of each...c'mon, man, you're the engineers. That's all you know?

Why this book devotes a chapter to Fault Management frankly escapes me. You can go a long way in Solaris 10 and not know or care about FMA. It's of course a very useful thing, but essential to a beginner? No. The Service Management Facility (SMF), on the other hand, fundamentally alters the administrative landscape for Solaris. Where is it? It's got about seven pages at the end of Chapter 2, "Boot, Service Management, and Shutdown." It's an architectural discussion of the sort I expected the FMA chapter to be, high-level and not intended for a lot of exploration at first. That's too bad. If anyone can figure out how to use SMF from this presentation, it's because you didn't need it.

Other elements I find bordering on silliness. Chapter 8, "Managing Disks," has an illustration of a hard drive that must be older than both my children, combined. Understanding storage technology today is well beyond mapping outdated disk anatomy to its logical view in Solaris. The authors don't seem to know: things have changed. A lot. And in Chapter 11, "Solaris User Management," eleven pages are devoted to no fewer than four key topics: managing users and groups, creating a NIS domain (??), and managing roles. Fifteen pages for fault management, eleven for the foundation to identifying users on a network of systems?

Patch management in Solaris can be a complicated exercise in hair-pulling. To that end, the book includes two tables, spanning six pages, that list and describe the patching tools and document the different patch types. The remainder of the chapter is a narrated if-then-else for patching; again, material you can find freely elsewhere. Of all the subjects where the reader might like more insight than information, patching is probably first on the list. No help here.

In summary, the engineering authors seem to have contributed brief architectural overviews, while the tech writers seem to have covered well-known territory not so well. It's a disappointing combination. You can't really experiment much with the former, or learn much from the latter that you couldn't teach yourself. If you've bought the initial books in these series, I recommend a careful look at subsequent titles before laying down real money. Seems to me the editorial standards may have taken a dive.

Don't buy this. Much better generic unix books on the market! The amount of information specific to solaris 10 is almost non-existent. Go to oracle documentation site and download their admin guide. Or better yet, take the class, the training manual is the best.

The books gives out a many details of Solaris system for basic system administration and is a handy reference book as well. For me, I wish it could put a little bit more in Service Management which is new and unique in Solaris 10 and not in any other unix platform.

I know that there are a lot stuff in Solaris 10 but I also think this book can get introduce ldom, with comparison to zone, as I guess there will be more and more sites use ldom in the future.

Today, working as a systems administrator, it is inevitable to have san connection in the system. It will be nice this book can introduce something about san and multipathing in Solaris 10.