Thursday, April 7, 2011

Linux to Solaris Administrators Guide

The aim of the Linux to Solaris Administrator Guide is to give Linux administrators the information and guidance they'll need to make a successful transition to using Solaris 10. The Linux to Solaris Administrators Guide is not intended for a first time system administrator. The guide assumes a certain amount of background administering a Linux system.
While similar in many respects there are still quite a few differences between a Linux and Solaris machine including commands, file systems and heritage.
These differences can be as simple as a renamed configuration file to the more complicated alternate meanings for command line arguments.
This chapter presents an overview of some of the differences between Linux and Solaris.
Topics Covered: Architectural Similarities and Differences, File System Organization, Locations of Common used Commands, Location of Configuration Files, Location of Log Files, Script Migration, Architectural Similarities and Di?erences
While similar in many respects there are fundamental differences between the Solaris and Linux operating environments.
Throughout the development of Solaris the focus has been on compatibility. Compatibility with previous releases (binaries compiled on Solaris 8 will run on Solaris 10) and compatibility with de jure standards such as POSIX. Linux has had the freedom to establish new de facto standards (such as extended command line syntax, with a strong consistency among commands). However, judicious use of the included GNU utilities, the proper command line settings, downloads of additional utilities, and some acquired knowledge such as this guide and sites such as the Rosetta Stone1 will mitigate most differences.
Many of the system similarities can be attributed to the implementation of different system standards. These standards make it a lot easier to move applications between Operating Systems. Solaris conforms to the POSIX, SVID and XPG standards.
Although many commands may have the same name, the implementation and command line options may have changed. The man pages should be consulted to verify the functionality of commands.

download: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/sysadmin_guide.pdf

The Linux System Administrator's Guide

The Linux System Administrator's Guide, describes the system administration aspects of using Linux. It is intended for people who know next to nothing about system administration (those saying "what is it?''), but who have already mastered at least the basics of normal usage. This manual doesn't tell you how to install Linux; that is described in the Installation and Getting Started document. See below for more information about Linux manuals.
System administration covers all the things that you have to do to keep a computer system in usable order. It includes things like backing up files (and restoring them if necessary), installing new programs, creating accounts for users (and deleting them when no longer needed), making certain that the filesystem is not corrupted, and so on. If a computer were, say, a house, system administration would be called maintenance, and would include cleaning, fixing broken windows, and other such things.
The structure of this manual is such that many of the chapters should be usable independently, so if you need information about backups, for example, you can read just that chapter. However, this manual is first and foremost a tutorial and can be read sequentially or as a whole.
This manual is not intended to be used completely independently. Plenty of the rest of the Linux documentation is also important for system administrators. After all, a system administrator is just a user with special privileges and duties. Very useful resources are the manual pages, which should always be consulted when you are not familiar with a command. If you do not know which command you need, then the apropos command can be used. Consult its manual page for more details.
While this manual is targeted at Linux, a general principle has been that it should be useful with other UNIX based operating systems as well. Unfortunately, since there is so much variance between different versions of UNIX in general, and in system administration in particular, there is little hope to cover all variants. Even covering all possibilities for Linux is difficult, due to the nature of its development.
There is no one official Linux distribution, so different people have different setups and many people have a setup they have built up themselves. This book is not targeted at any one distribution. Distributions can and do vary considerably. When possible, differences have been noted and alternatives given. For a list of distributions and some of their differences see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions.
In trying to describe how things work, rather than just listing ``five easy steps'' for each task, there is much information here that is not necessary for everyone, but those parts are marked as such and can be skipped if you use a preconfigured system. Reading everything will, naturally, increase your understanding of the system and should make using and administering it more productive.

download: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/LDP/system-admin-guide/sag.pdf