Solaris 11 has had many changes in just about every area of the operating system. The difference between Solaris 10 and 11 is as great, if not greater, than the difference between Solaris 9 and 10. Filesystems, networking, zone management, and even installation of the OS itself have drastically changed. This book will help you take advantage of them to best effect.
Chapter 1, IPS – The Image Packaging System, details how to use the new software package system.
Chapter 2, Solaris 11 Installation Methods, gives specific examples and case studies of how to use the new OS install methods that Solaris 11 uses.
Chapter 3, Sysadmin Configuration Differences, covers the differences in day-to-day procedures that the average Solaris administrator needs to know.
Chapter 4, Networking Nuts and Bolts, delves into the fancier options and configurations now available in Solaris 11 networking.
Chapter 5, NWAM – NetWork AutoMagic, shows how to use the new auto-configuring network tool.
Chapter 6, ZFS –Now You Can't Ignore It, covers the new mandatory ZFS filesystem.
Chapter 7, Zones in Solaris 11, explores the new features and functionality of zones.
Chapter 8, Security Improvements, covers the new mandatory security auditing, as well as some other improvements.
Chapter 9, Miscellaneous, has a few things that are don't fit elsewhere.
Appendix A, IPS Package Reference; Appendix B, New ACL Permissions and Abbreviations; and Appendix C, Solaris 10 Available Enhancements – gives a few handy lists of command options.
This book will be helpful to you, if you actually have a test Solaris box to play with. If you happen to have a spare SPARC (T series or M series only) or x86 machine laying around to test on, that's great. This book will show you a few different methods for installation. Otherwise, you may wish to experience Solaris 11 through a Virtual Machine (VM).
Oracle provides pre-made downloadable images for the free VirtualBox VM system. To use this, you will require at least 1 gigabytes of free RAM, and ideally more than 10 gigabytes of free disk space. Get the VM software from http://www.virtualbox.org and then do a web search for "solaris 11 vm download". This should take you to the current Oracle page for downloading the VM image itself.
This book is intended for sysadmins who have had some experience with Solaris 10, and are either considering whether to upgrade, or just want to be aware of all major changes when they do.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "To limit pkg search to only search package names, we must use a modifier of pkg.fmri:."
A block of code is set as follows:
<publisher name="solaris">
<origin name="http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release"/>
</publisher>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ pkg info gzip|grep FMRI
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Don't choose Automatically for your networking type choice, unless you are installing to a laptop or workstation."
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