Solaris 10 Systems Administration Part 2 — A 2-Day Course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Synopsis

This two-day course is designed to cover the essential network administration tasks confronting today's Sun network systems administrators, and is an extension to our Solaris 10 System Administration (Part 1) course which covers all the basic issues. This course covers networking from initial connection through basic commands, security, monitoring and up to Network File System (NFS) and the Network Information Service (NIS)and the LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access protocol) name service. The advanced topics include the Solaris Volume manager, Jumpstart (automated installs), Zones, and Live Upgrade, all with full hands-on experience at all stages. This course, combined with the Solaris 10 Advanced Administration course, is comparable with the Sun SA-202-S10 (now PK-SA-202A-S10) course and leads to the Solaris Certified Administrator (Part 2) CX-310-202 exam. Compared by price, our combined courses are 41% less than Sun's.

Prerequisites

Knowledge of Solaris up to a level taught in our Introduction to Solaris and Solaris Systems Administration Part 1 courses is important, and some previous administration experience is helpful.

Follow-ups

Solaris 10 Advanced System Administration, a three-day course covering a wide variety of advanced administration topics.

This course is part of a program which can lead you to Solaris Certification Combining this course with the Solaris 10 Advanced System Administration prepares you for the Solaris Certified Administrator Part 2 CX-310-202 exam.

Our Solaris Utilities and Shell Programming is another popular course for administrators wishing to gain knowledge of shell programming and Solaris utilities, with special emphasis on the needs of the administrator

The Solaris Network Administration course is a further stage, providing training to a level required for the Solaris Network Administrator exam CX-310-302.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Contents

Network Interface Configuration

• Configuring a machine's IPv4 interfaces manually for network connection, with many ifconfig examples.
• Discovering network interfaces with dladm.
• Understanding Internet Address classes and CIDR, and formulating Internet addresses.
• Configuring logical interfaces.
• IPMP (Multipathing) configuration and operation (Failover and load spreading)
• Network basic commands and the associated security files. Using Secure Shell (ssh).
• Network daemons. inetd.and SMF (Service Management facility). The inetadm and inetconv commands. TCP wrappers.
• Network Monitoring utilities (snoop, netstat, traceroute, nmap, ethereal, etc)

Network File System (NFS) and AutoFS

• Overview.
• Benefits and uses of NFS
• Sharing file systems and managing an NFS server.
• The /etc/dfs/dfstab and /etc/dfs/sharetab files.
• NFS clients. The mount command.
• NFS security. NFS logging. NFS strategies.
• The NFS automounter (AutoFS). Starting and stopping autofs.
• Automount maps - indirect, hosts, and direct.
• Failover entries in maps. Using variables and wildcards in maps.
• Modifying automount options in /etc/default/autofs. Using SMC with NFS.
• NFSv4 features.

SAMBA Server Overview

• A brief overview of this powerful and impressive free open-source server now included with Solaris 10, which effectively turns a Solaris machine (or other UNIX/Linux machine) into a Windows NT file server
• A working SAMBA installation will be created, with graphical configuration using swat via a web browser

Overview of Solaris name services

• NIS
• NIS+, LDAP and DNS - how they work, advantages and disadvantages of each
• The Name Service Switch and /etc/nsswitch.conf
• The Name Service Cache Daemon (nscd)

DNS clients

• Configuring clients to use DNS name service.

LDAP Name Services

• Introduction to LDAP.
• Data examples
• DIT and data structure
• Schemas.
• Servers and clients. Planning and Preparation.
• Sun Java Directory Server. Directory Server Components. Directory Server Download. Distribution unpacking.
• Running idsktune.
• Directory Server basic setup, testing, getting status information, adding test data.
• Using idsconfig to populate the server with standard name-service data.
• Create a server instance. Backing up a server instance.
• Directory Server Proxy.
• Adding a client machine
  • - Running ldapclient.
  • - Listing LDAP data from the client.
  • - LDAP client files.
• LDAP utilities - ldapaddent, ldaplist, ldapadd, ldapmodify.
• Directory Service Control Center.
• Enabling Services under the SMF
• SMF XML Manifest file ds6.xml.
• Server Backup and Restore
• Server Replication - Reference only. Server Replication Tasks.
• Microsoft Active Directory (ADS) integration pointers.

Solaris Management Console

• Installation. Configuration of extra toolboxes for use with multiple servers
• Using the toolbox editor.

Swap Management and Configuration

• Virtual memory
• Examining a machine's current swap allocation.
• Creating new swap slices and files.
• Adding swap details to /etc/vfstab

Crash dumps and core files

• What are they? How to manage and restrict.
• The coreadm and dumpadm commands.

Solaris Volume Manager (SVM) and RAID

• Describe RAID levels
• Describe the features of SVM.
• Implement SVM on a Solaris system
• The metadevice state databases.
• Creating concatenated and striped metadevices.
• Creating and adding mirrors, removing mirrors, taking mirrors off-line.
• Hot Spares.
• Expanding file systems with growfs.
• Using the GUI to perform SVM tasks and monitor SVM status.

Role-based Access Control (RBAC)

• RBAC facilities. Applying rights and roles to users.
• Using the GUI smc to manage RBAC.
• Using the command line to manage RBAC.
• RBAC files and directories.

Solaris Zones

• Features of Solaris zones. The uses for zone partitioning.
• Configure, install and boot zones.
• Pre-configuring zone installation information.
• Adding additional directories and resources to an existing zone.
• Controlling zone resource limitations.
• Moving, renaming, cloning and migrating zones.
• Running Linux, Solaris8 and Solaris 9 zones. (Branded zones).
• Package and patch issues with zones.
• Zone FAQ.

System Messaging and Log Management.

• System logging (syslogd) operation.
• The syslog.conf configuration file directives.
• Using the logger command to add messages to logs
• Using the smc log viewer.
• Log file management with crontab.

Automatic Solaris Installation (Jumpstart)

• Jump Start Overview.
• Build servers
• Copying Solaris to disk.
• Creating rules and profiles for automatic building of SPARC and Intel Solaris installs.
• Using DHCP to support Jumpstart clients.
• Booting and building from the network interactively and automatically.
• Using Jumpstart to build a ZFS-based root system.

Flash Installs

• Overview
• Creating a Flash archive.
• Modify the JumpStart files to use a flash archive for installation.
• Modifying flash installs
• Performing a flash install.
• ZFS and flash installs.

Introduction to the Apache web server

• Apache Web Server installation and activation.
• Installing a custom web site
• Enabling the Jakarta Tomcat java facility.
• Examples of common Apache configuration directives.

Live Upgrade

• Live Upgrade overview and benefits, Live Upgrade commands.
• What can be upgraded? Hardware and software requirements, including patch levels.
• Using lucreate to create an alternate boot environment (BE) from a running system.
• Upgrading the boot environment:
  • - from Solaris 8 or 9 to Solaris 10.
  • - to a later release of Solaris 10.
• Maintaining boot environments with patches and software packages.
• Activation of a boot environment, Reverting to a previous boot environment.
• Using Live Upgrade to migrate to a ZFS root pool.
• Creating and using differential flash archives in a Live Upgrade environment.
• Jumpstart and Live Upgrade.

Network Information Service (NIS) - These notes are included for reference purposes only.

• Introduction
• Creating a fully-functioning NIS service.
• Using the ypinit command to create Master and Slave servers.
• Updating the NIS information from the command line.
• Using SMC with NIS to manage users, groups and hosts.
• Adding NIS clients.
• NIS file policies.
• Creating and using netgroups with /etc/netgroup.
• Adding your own data to NIS
• Modifying the NIS Makefile
• Disabling NIS.