Solaris 8 Essential Reference

Slashdot reader Adam Jenkins contributed the review below of John P. Mulligan's Solaris 8 Essential Reference. If you operate a Solaris box for fun or profit, this book may prove be a useful reference, though Adam has some reservations about the book's completeness, especially regarding the new features you'd expect a book updated for Solaris 8 to cover.

Solaris 8 Essential Reference author John P. Mulligan pages 346 publisher New Riders Publishing rating 6.5 reviewer Adam Jenkins ISBN 0-7357-1007-4 summary An update to the Solaris 7 Essential Reference

A New Book for a New Release John Mulligan is known for his Web site SolarisGuide.com and the first Solaris Essential Reference. This is the second edition, updated for the Solaris 8 release. The technical reviewers of the book were Solaris administrators Jeffrey Meltzer and Nojan Moshiri.

Overview In the Introduction we are told that the book emphasizes the essentials of SunOS 5.x rather than Open Windows since 'anything that can be done from a GUI can also be done from a command line.' While this old adage is true, and the command line is certainly a very powerful and standard way to use Unix, many of the recent additions to Solaris are designed to make administration easier by using GUI tools.

What's in it for me? There are three main parts to the text. There is the General Use Reference, which covers text utilities, shell scripting, process control and network clients and utilities. Part II is a Developer Reference, covering compilers/interpreters, programming utilities and debugging. Part III is the Administration and Maintenance Task Reference, with sections on startup and shutdown, user management, network administration, filesystems, security, and system configuration and tuning.

The Appendices list Solaris version changes, common startup problems and solutions, Linux compatibility, the GNU Public License, list of Web resources, signals list, and a TCP/UDP port list. The Web resources list is well organized into sites covering administration, CDE, developer resources, hardware, lists of sources, magazines, online documentation (including SolarisGuide's RTFM documentation), security, software, Solaris x86 and Solaris PPP/NAT. The resources chosen seem to be tried and tested, as those that I tried were all still at the addresses given.

The port list only covers fairly standard ports, listing them both by service and by port number. The services list includes a note next to each with recommendations like disable or log for those known to have security issues.

What's good? The security section includes information on the new Role Based Access Control (RBAC) as well as how to enable the Basic Security Module although more information on what the BSM does would've been helpful. There is a section on the LDAP utilities that come with Solaris 8 and how to use them.

What's bad? Some of the examples are spaced out over two lines awkwardly. The ftp sites given in the Security section are no longer working since the directory structure at Purdue's COAST was re-arranged as CERIAS. This is not the fault of the author or publisher; it's just the nature of the Internet to be dynamic.

There is no coverage of IP Filters or firewalls, patch analyzer, Network Cache and Accelerator, the Sun Management Center, VPNs or the extra software that comes with Solaris 8 (Oracle, StarOffice, the Palm HotSync utilities, Forte, Apache and iPlanet). The Linux compatibility section was disappointing: it consists of just one page describing the utility called lxrun that lets you run Linux binaries under Solaris x86. There is also a glaring typo on the contents page: 'Admininstration.'

Conclusion The title Solaris 8 Essential Reference is a fairly tough promise to live up to. The book is good as a Solaris reference, giving general coverage of the Solaris operating system for users, developers and administrators. However, it misses a lot of the main features of Solaris 8, which are probably the reasons most people would buy version 8 in the first place.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

Comments

I'd hate to be Sun right now...

[Proud Geek]

They've been losing market share to NT for years already, and now even comitted UNIX houses are switching from Solaris to Linux. Just look at the recent decision by SIAC to switch their mission-critical systems from Solaris to Linux. A combination of slow, overpriced hardware and an inability to compete on the software front has done them in. Even with the Java strategy, they have little hope of survival.

Why would anyone buy a Sun? Historically, they have offered excellent workstation-class machines. Now, their best single and dual processor ultrasparc based workstations are easily outclassed in every way by much cheaper boxes based on Intel and AMD processors. Performance that was once reserved for the most affluent corporate power users can now be found on the desk of the lowly janitor or student. The only place that Sun still distinguishes itself is in the large enterprise server with many processors and multiple layers of redundancy. Even there, solutions based on x86-64 and ia64 are arriving, and promise to offer all the same features at a much lower price.

On the software side, Sun makes an OS that is noted as being slow but scalable. With fast PC's, scalability on a single system is becoming less of a concern. Also, Windows 2000 already has many of the scalability features, and Linux is closing the gap quickly. Even five years ago, it made perfect sense to buy a Sun workstation for a developer. Now Linux fills that position, and a Sun machine is a waste of money. How long can it be before the same is true of high end workstations, clusters, and even enterprise big iron? IBM is putting their massive resources behind mainframe Linux. With Sun's proven inability to compete with Linux in any market that it has entered, they should be very afraid.

Sun's one bright spot is Java. With the massive adoption of J2EE for the middle tier in web infrastructure it is a powerful reminder of what Sun once was, and what they still can do when they get it right. Still, further analysis shows that Java is not a trump card for Sun. Far more than Solaris, two other operating systems are positioning themselves as "the best platform for Java." One is MacOS X, another proprietary UNIX by a more innovative vendor. The other threat to Sun is once again from Linux. With the failure of Java to catch on to the desktop, and the failure in the embedded market, Sun will have great difficulty leveraging Java to improve their financial situation.

The future does not look bright for Sun. Facing cheap hardware from Intel and AMD, and software competition from Linux and Microsoft, they have utterly failed to put together a competitive offering. With the failure of their Java technology to improve the outlook, they have all but curled up and died.