A Quick Tour of the Contents

Chapter 1, "Introducing Solaris System Administration," describes basic administration tasks and superuser status. It tells how to communicate with users, start up and shut down systems, and monitor processes. It also introduces some frequently used commands and the new Administration Tools in the Solaris 8 Operating Environment.

Chapter 2, "Using Basic OS Commands," describes basic commands for finding user and environment information, creating and editing files, combining commands and redirecting output, displaying manual pages, and locating basic disk information.

Chapter 3, "Understanding the Flash Install and Live Upgrade Features," describes two installation features new in the Solaris 9 release.

Chapter 4, "Understanding Shells," describes some commands common to all shells and provides basic information about the Bourne, C, Korn, Bourne-Again, tcsh, and zsh shells.

Chapter 5, "Administering User Accounts and Groups," describes how to add and remove user accounts and how to set up new group accounts.

Chapter 6, "Administering Rights and Roles," introduces the Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) security feature, new in the Solaris 8 Operating Environment, that enables you to assign a subset of superuser privileges to one or more users.

Chapter 7, "Administering File Systems," describes the types of file systems provided in the Solaris Operating Environment, the default file system, the virtual file system table, and the file system administrative commands. It shows you how to make file systems available and how to back up and restore file systems.

Chapter 8, "Administering Devices," describes how to use tapes and diskettes to store and retrieve files and how to administer disks. It also introduces the Service Access Facility and provides instructions for setting up port monitors for printers and modems.

Chapter 9, "Administering Systems," describes commands to display system-specific information, configure additional swap space without reformatting a disk, and create a local mail alias.

Chapter 10, "Administering Network Services," describes commands to check on remote system status, log in to remote systems, and transfer files between systems. This chapter also introduces the IPv6 Internet protocol, describes how to display network statistics and configuration information, how to use the snoop command, and how to use the Secure Shell.

Chapter 11, "Administering Printing," introduces the LP print service, describes how to set up printing services, and explains how to use the printing commands.

Chapter 12, "Recognizing File Access Problems," provides information on how to recognize problems with search paths, permission, and ownership.

The Glossary contains basic system administration terms and definitions.