Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration: Fundamentals v. I

From the perspective of presenting a top-down, very contemporary, articulate, complete, and thoroughly well-produced book, this reference gives you a handy all-in-one guide to system administration on Oracle Solaris 11.1. All the major and important system administration activities and procedures, as well as some minor facts which might seem trivial at first, but are actually very important, are covered in a clear and cogent way. If you had to wade through the huge volume of documentation provided by Oracle that comes with the software ( or use your Google-Fu), just to find out the details of some small fact or technique, you would realize how powerful this book really is. It will make your life with Solaris easier, like it did mine.Just a few examples: there is a section on dealing with removable media such as USB devices, drives, thumb drives. There is excellent coverage of Secure Shell, how to start it up, manage it, etc.. Those are practical and contemporary subjects that a modern UNIX System Administration book must cover. Also, there is extensive coverage of how to add packages to your base system via the command line, which is a very critical, practical System Administration topic!A tremendous added benefit- ZFS is covered and explained completely and beautifully!Even if this book cost 3 times what Amazon is charging, you must have it.Robert M. KoretskyUNIX: The TextbookEdited 4/7/14- A big benefit of using Solaris 11.1 instead of OpenIndiana (May the Computer Gods forgive me for espousing a commercial system over a freeware system) is that the IPS GUI Package Manager on Solaris 11.1 has access to more packages that actually can be installed on your system. Even though the author recommends and heavily illustrates using a command line version of the IPS Package Manager, I found that with the default Gnome desktop GUI and IPS GUI, I could download and install Python 2.7.3 with Tkinter built into it from the Solaris repository in a couple of easy steps. Very similar to using the command line pkg package management system in PC-BSD or FreeBSD to get new packages from the FreeBSD Repository.Edited 10/15/14- I'm into virtualization now, and it seems the common shortcoming of documentation on zones (this book included) is that no one tells you how to log into the zone from the Internet using ssh, FTP, or telnet, or how to actually install an application in the zone! For example, what IP address do you use to ssh into a zone running on a Solaris 11.2 machine, from somewhere on your LAN or the Internet? And as far as installing an application, I don't mean a full web server stack, just some simple app that you don't trust and want to put in a zone to test. This book shows you how to create and administrate zones (it is an administration book after all), but not how to actually use them in some simple cases! After all, it does do that with zfs. I'm hoping that the authors' advanced book will do that. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/servers-storage-admin/o11-092-s11-zones-intro-524494.html is a web page at Oracle that has an excellent intro to zones, and shows in a few easy steps how to add apache-22 to a zone! Bravo! And the Oracle web page also adds the zone to rpool on the vdev that Solaris boots from- Dr. Calkins in his zone intro creates a new zpool on another hard disk for the zone. I don't quite get the rational for that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No real depth beyond what is available in Oracle's online documentation and man pages, and frequently less. How can you write a whole chapter on ZFS and not even mention log and cache devices in passing?

Didn't apply much to my specific tasks.

Product great, arrived on time.

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.