Solaris users must belong to one group, which is their primary group. However, users can also belong to several other groups, known as secondary groups.

A 512-byte individual storage unit on a hard disk.

A computer on the network that provides services or information to other devices on the network.

A logical grouping of hard disks that can be shared with other computers. If the host computer were to fail, another computer could take over the management of the hard disks.

The interface that enables users to input information to be interpreted by the operating system. Examples are the Bourne shell (sh), Korn shell (ksh), and C shell (csh).

A file located on a server that affects all user login profiles.

In a NIS domain, these computers contain copies of the NIS maps, resolve queries for client computers, and act as backups for the NIS master server.

A file created with the fssnap command, a snapshot is a picture of the file system at a given time. The snapshot can be used to create a backup archive while the file system remains mounted.

Also known as a symbolic link, a soft link is an indirect pointer to a file or a directory. Soft links can span file systems.

A logical volume created on a hard disk (from within the Solaris Volume Manager) that enables you to create more than eight volumes per hard disk.

A collection of Solaris software packages. Solaris 9 has five software groups: Core, End User, Developer, Entire, and Entire plus OEM.

A collection of files and directories needed to run a specific program, application, or service.

A utility packaged with Solaris that provides advanced storage management capabilities, including creating RAID volumes, soft partitions, hot spare pools, and transactional volumes.

On a NIS master server, these are the files from which the maps are created or updated.

A RISC processor type developed and used by Sun Microsystems.

Also known as forking, it's when a process causes another process to start.

A database on your hard disk that stores information about the computer's Solaris Volume Manager configuration. A state database is composed of several state database replicas.

Each individual copy of a state database. There should be a minimum of three replicas per computer.

A security attribute that can be enabled to prevent the accidental deletion of files located in public directories.

The individual hard disks or slices that are components in a mirrored volume.

One of the four Solaris installation programs, it uses a rudimentary graphical and command-line interface.

An area at the beginning of each disk slice (and replicated throughout the slice) that stores critical file system information such as the size of the file system, disk label (VTOC), cylinder group size, number of data blocks present, summary data block, file system state, and pathname of the last mount point.

A virtual file system responsible for managing physical and virtual memory as well as the paging process.

A network device, similar to a hub, that enables several computers to communicate with one another. Switches are more intelligent than hubs and can do a better job of managing network traffic.

When setting permissions by using the chmod command, symbolic mode uses letters to identify whom the permissions will affect as well as the permissions that will be set.

A file that provides system network identification information to a computer.

The name of the Solaris logging service.

The daemon responsible for system logging.

The hard disk that contains the operating system files (located on slice 0).

Tracking events (such as user logins, file access, and various problems) as they happen on the computer.

One of the two major UNIX architecture standards and the most commonly used one today. Since 1992 (with the release of Solaris 2), Solaris has been based on SVR4.