The aim of the Linux to Solaris Administrator Guide is to give Linux adminis-
trators 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 rst time
system administrator. The guide assumes a certain amount of background ad-
ministering a Linux system.
The major topics in this guide include:
Chapter Description
Overview Overview of Solaris and Linux di erences.
Solaris Features
not Available in Linux
An overview of some of the new features in So-
laris 10 that either don't exist, or are still in the
development phase, on Linux.
Command Di erences Information on command di erences between
Linux and Solaris.
Installation Information on installation and its comparison to
Linux.
Software Management Information on software management di erences
in Solaris as compared to Linux.
System Management Information on system management di erences in
Solaris as compared to Linux.
Device Management Information on device management di erences in
Solaris as compared to Linux.
Security and Hardening Information on security and system hardening dif-
ferences in Solaris as compared to Linux.
Monitoring Performance Information on system monitoring and perfor-
mance in Solaris as compared to Linux.
Backup and Restore An overview and comparison of backup and re-
store procedures between Solaris and Linux.
Troubleshooting Information on troubleshooting common Solaris
issues and errors.
After reviewing the material in this book you should have enough exposure
to be able to install and maintain a Solaris machine.
ix
Chapter 1
Overview of Linux and
Solaris Di erences
While similar in many respects there are still quite a few di erences between
a Linux and Solaris machine including commands, le systems and heritage.
These di erences can be as simple as a renamed conguration le to the more
complicated alternate meanings for command line arguments.
This chapter presents an overview of some of the di erences between Linux
and Solaris.
Topics Covered
Architectural Similarities and Di erences
File System Organization
Locations of Common used Commands
Location of Conguration Files
Location of Log Files
Script Migration
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Linux to Solaris Administrators Guide
Architectural Similarities and Di erences
While similar in many respects there are fundamental di erences 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 di erences.
Many of the system similarities can be attributed to the implementation
of di erent 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 con-
sulted to verify the functionality of commands.
The rst di erence you'll probably notice is the default shell. The default
Linux shell is Bash. Linux distributions typically symlink /bin/sh to /bin/bash.
In Solaris, on the other hand, /bin/sh remains the Bourne shell; this is done
to preserve absolute compatibility with existing shell scripts. Bash is upwards
compatible from the Bourne shell, but includes many additional extensions;
Bash is available on Solaris as /bin/bash. You may want to make a root account
with /bin/bash as its shell.
Depending on the kernel conguration a Linux kernel will be either dynam-
ically linked or monolithic. The Solaris kernel is always dynamically linked.
The standard Solaris le system format is UFS; the extra-cost le systems
VxFS and QFS are often used as well. Beginning with Solaris 10 6/06 Solaris
ZFS is also available. Linux will typically use one of ext3, reiser, JFS or XFS.
File System Organization
There are many similarities between Linux and Solaris le system hierarchies.
That being said, there are slight variations in the usage of some directories.
Table 1.1 lists the common le system directories.
Of these directories only one directory has di erences worth noting, /proc.
On Linux, /proc contains information on the current system conguration and
1http://bhami.com/rosetta.html
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Table 1.1: Common le system directories
/ /sbin /bin
/lib /usr /etc
/var /opt /proc
process along with les you can alter to update kernel variables and process
information. On Solaris the /proc directory only contains process information.
You won't use /proc to update kernel tunables or retrieve system information.
Solaris adds the /platform directory which contains platform specic infor-
mation and applications. There is no equivalent to /platform on Linux.
For a full description of the le system organization on Solaris please refer
to the lesystem(5) manpage.
Locations of Common Commands
One of the more frustrating aspects of changing operating environments is de-
termining the location of commonly used commands. There is a common set of
command directories between Linux and Solaris which are listed in Table 1.2.
Table 1.2: Common command directories
/bin /usr/bin
/sbin /usr/sbin
In order to maintain compatibility with System V, BSD and GNU software
Solaris also includes several extra command directories. These extra directories
can be seen in Table 1.3.
Table 1.3: Extra Solaris command directories
/usr/openwin/bin /usr/dt/bin /usr/sfw/bin
/opt/sfw/bin /usr/xpg4/bin /usr/ccs/bin
/usr/ucb
/usr/bin contains the standard System V implementation of certain applica-
tions. /usr/ucb contains implementations that are compatible with legacy BSD
versions. Some commands exist in both /usr/bin and /usr/ucb with di ering
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implementations. You'll need to determine which version meets your require-
ments when doing script migrations and setup your PATH as required. Table
1.4 lists some /usr/ucb commands which may di er from the implementation
of the same command in /usr/bin.
Table 1.4: Solaris commands in /usr/ucb
basename df du echo expr fastboot
fasthalt le from groups install ld
lint ln lpc lpq lpr lprm
lptest ls mkstr printenv ps rusage
sed shutdown stty sum test touch
tr tset users vipw whereis whoami
Along with the System V and BSD versions there are two directories that
contain free software. These are the /usr/sfw/bin and /opt/sfw/bin directo-
ries. /usr/sfw/bin will contain any freeware installed o the Install media while
/opt/sfw/bin contains software installed o of the Companion CD.
The free software versions are the same implementations as found on a Linux
machine. These GNU commands on Solaris are typically prexed with a g. (e.g.
tar vs gtar).
As Solaris matures, some software that used to be shipped with the Com-
panion CD slowly makes its way into the Solaris install media. You may notice
that on a given release of Solaris a command in /opt/sfw/bin may migrate to
/usr/sfw/bin.
Note that software delivered in /usr/sfw is fully supported by Sun through
Sun's standard support channels. Software delivered in /opt/sfw is community
supported. These are simply packaged by Sun for convenience. If support issues
arise regarding software in /opt/sfw, the usual open source support channels
must be used.
Location of Conguration Files
Networking
Table 1.5 lists the Linux and equivalent Solaris networking conguration les.
File System
Table 1.6 lists the Linux and equivalent Solaris le system conguration les.
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Table 1.5: Linux and Solaris networking conguration les
Linux Solaris
/etc/ntp.conf /etc/inet/ntp.conf
/etc/inetd.conf /etc/inet/inetd.conf
/etc/syscong/network-scripts/ifcfg-finterfaceg /etc/inet/netmasks
/etc/networks /etc/inet/networks
Table 1.6: Linux and Solaris le system conguration les
Linux Solaris
/etc/fstab /etc/vfstab
/etc/exports /etc/dfs/dfstab (format is di erent)
/etc/auto.master /etc/auto master
/etc/auto.home /etc/auto home
Mail
Table 1.7 lists the Linux and equivalent Solaris mail conguration les.
Table 1.7: Linux and Solaris mail conguration les
Linux Solaris
/etc/aliases /etc/mail/aliases
/etc/mail.rc /etc/mail/Mail.rc
/etc/mail/mailx.rc
Sendmail conguration on Linux is typically stored in the /etc/mail direc-
tory. On versions of Solaris up to Solaris 9 this conguration was stored in
/usr/lib/mail. With Solaris 10 the /usr/lib/mail directory is a symlink to the
/etc/mail directory.
Location of Log Files
There is one main log le directory used on a Linux system, /var/log. This is
where the log les for the various system daemons are stored.
Solaris uses a slightly di erent setup for its log directories. /var/log stores
the syslog and authlog les and /var/adm stores the messages log le, /var/log/messages.
This is the le that contains the logs for everything. (By default, this is cong-
urable in the syslog.conf le.)
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Script Migration
There are a few pieces of information that need to be gathered when porting
shell scripts from Linux to Solaris.
First, make sure that any le system paths used by the scripts are valid on
Solaris 10. As mentioned in Section 1 some of the commands maybe in di erent
locations, or have di erent implementations. If there are GNU versions of the
commands available, via the Software Companion CD, alter the path to utilize
this version. (Check both /usr/sfw/bin and /opt/sfw/bin to see if the GNU
version exists).
Once you've got all the command paths veried, check that the command
line arguments are still correct on Solaris. As discussed in Chapter 3, Linux
commands that utilize the long option names ({option-name) may be candidates
for modication. The Solaris equivalents of those commands most likely don't
understand the long options, unless you're using the GNU versions.
If you are taking any command output and parsing it to extract specic
information you may need to re-write the parsing routines to match the output
of the program on Solaris.
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Chapter 2
Solaris Features not in
Linux
With the release of Solaris 10, and the subsequent updates, there are several
features available that provide a unique value proposition for the utilization
of Solaris 10: features ranging from virtualization, to application tracing and
service management. These tools make it easier to harness the full potential of
your hardware and to track down any latent performance issues.
This chapter will provide a brief overview of four key features now available
in Solaris 10: service management with the Solaris Service Manager (SMF),
Virtualization using Zones, dynamic tracing using DTrace, self healing and the
Solaris ZFS.
While all of these features are very powerful tools provided with Solaris
10, only SMF is required learning when transitioning to Solaris 10. All other
features, Zones, DTrace and ZFS included, can be set aside and incorporated
at your own pace.
Topics Covered
SMF
Zones
DTrace
ZFS
Predictive Self Healing
7
Linux to Solaris Administrators Guide
SMF
The Service Management Facility (SMF) is the new system to manage services
in Solaris 10. SMF takes over the role that was previously delegated to scripts
in the /etc/rc*.d directories, although those scripts will continue to run.
Your rst encounters with a Solaris 10 machine may leave you wondering
how to manage any running services. The /etc/rc*.d/ directories are relatively
empty compared to Linux. The reason for this is SMF. The majority of the
system services available under Solaris 10 are controlled by SMF. In order to
control these services you'll need to get familiar with a couple of SMF commands:
svcs(1) and svcadm(1M). These two commands will allow you to start, stop,
diagnose and control the services previously controlled through /etc/rc*.d.
Enabling and disabling of services is done with the svcadm command. As
can be seen in Figure 2.1 we use the enable and disable subcommands to modify
the service state.
Figure 2.1: Modifying service states
# svcadm enable network/http:apache2
# svcadm disable network/http:apache2
SMF service states are persistent. If you enable or disable a service and
reboot your machine the service will be restored to the state last specied.
There are several other subcommands to svcadm that will be benecial to
know when working with a Solaris 10 machine. See svcadm(1M) for the full list
of subcommands.
Information on the services running, or available, on the system can be
obtained using the svcs command. Figure 2.2 shows some possible output from
svcs -a.
There are a few things to note in Figure 2.2.
First notice how the services are named. Each service has a unique FMRI
(fault management resource identier) that identies the service. Some of the
services have an instance name on the end (the :default of svc:/network/ssh:default).
There can be multiple instances of a single service executing on the system at
one time.
Second, notice the svc:/milestone/multi-user-server:default FMRI. SMF uses
a system of milestones instead of run levels to specify the system state. We can
see that I currently have milestone/multi-user-server enabled. More informa-
tion on Solaris 10 milestones can be found in the System Management chapter.
The nal thing to note is the STATE column. This column is telling us the
current state of each service. The legacy run state is for services that are still
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Figure 2.2: System services
# svcs -a
STATE STIME FMRI
legacy_run 15:33:43 lrc:/etc/rc3_d/S84appserv
legacy_run 15:33:44 lrc:/etc/rc3_d/S90samba
...
disabled 15:33:33 svc:/network/shell:kshell
disabled 15:33:33 svc:/network/talk:default
...
online 15:33:44 svc:/milestone/multi-user-server:default
online 15:33:47 svc:/system/zones:default
...
offline 15:33:17 svc:/network/ssh:default
offline 15:33:18 svc:/application/print/ipp-listener:default
executing from the old /etc/rc*.d scripts. The disabled state species all of the
services that have been disabled on the system. The online state lists all of the
services that are currently enabled on the system. Lastly, oine lists all of the
services that were unable to start, or had a service fault, and have been taken
oine by SMF.
Typically any oine services will need to be investigated to determine the
reason for their o -lining. The svcs -x command can be used to gather informa-
tion on the o -lined processes. Figure 2.3 shows that the svc:/network/physical:default
service is disabled. Adding the -v
ag we can see that this is causing the
svc:/network/ssh:default service to be o -lined.
The svcs -x output also gives pointers on where you can go for information
on the current issue. These can be pointers to websites, log les or man pages.
These are typically very handy resources in diagnosing and correcting the issue
at hand.
Along with svcs and svcadm there are several other commands that are used
to interact with SMF. These commands are listed in Table 2.1.
Table 2.1: SMF Commands
Command Description
svccfg Congure services.
inetadm Administer inetd services.
inetconv Convert inetd services to SMF.
The inetd services have been converted to run under SMF. Inetd still func-
tions as it did previously, launching the required service as a request comes in,
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Figure 2.3: SMF state explanations
# svcs -x
svc:/network/physical:default (physical network interfaces)
State: disabled since Thu Sep 28 15:33:17 2006
Reason: Disabled by an administrator.
See: http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-05
See: ifconfig(1M)
Impact: 5 dependent services are not running. (Use -v for list.)
# svcs -xv
svc:/network/physical:default (physical network interfaces)
State: disabled since Thu Sep 28 15:33:17 2006
Reason: Disabled by an administrator.
See: http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-05
See: man -M /usr/share/man -s 1M ifconfig
Impact: 5 dependent services are not running:
svc:/milestone/network:default
svc:/network/nfs/nlockmgr:default
svc:/network/nfs/client:default
svc:/network/nfs/status:default
svc:/network/ssh:default
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it's just controlled through the unied SMF interface.
When a service is dened in SMF you can also dene any dependencies of
that service. For example, PostgreSQL depends on a local le system. With that
knowledge, SMF knows that if the user disables the le system that PostgreSQL
depends on it also needs to disable PostgreSQL.
This dependency information is also used by SMF to execute as much of
the boot processes in parallel as possible. SMF can take any services which
don't depend on each other and start them at the same time. This can result
in quicker boot times as compared to the linear processing of the /etc/rc*.d
scripts.
There are three main types of services provided by SMF.Transient, Wait and
Contract services. Transient services are often conguration services requiring
no long-running process. Wait services run for the lifetime of the child process
and are restarted when the process exits. Contract services are the standard
system daemons and require processes which run forever once started. The
death of all processes in a contract service is considered a service error which
will cause the service to restart.
More information on SMF can be found in the Solaris Service Management
Facility - Quickstart Guide 1 and the applicable sections of the Solaris Admin-
istration Guide: Basic Administration2.
Zones
Virtualization is quickly becoming a hot topic in system administration. The
ability to run multiple instances of an operating system on a single machine
allows us to increase the overall usefulness of that machine. We're able to take
some of the idle CPU time, free memory and unused disk and run two, three or
four parts of our network architecture.
Sun has taken this technology in hand with Solaris 10 and presents the
concept of Zones. (You may also see references to Solaris Containers, which are
Zones coupled with Resource Management.)
If you've heard of chroot jails, originating from FreeBSD, you'll understand
the basic concept of Zones. When utilizing Zones there is one instance of the
Solaris kernel. Even though there is only one kernel, all of the zones, except in
one special case, are segregated and isolated from each other. (The special case
being the global zone which can see everything.)
Each zone on the system can have its own IP address, resource controls, root
and user accounts, running services and installed software. The only way for
two zones to communicate is using the TCP/IP networking capabilities.
1http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/smf-quickstart.html
2http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-1985
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There has been a lot of work to make the creation and interaction with zones
as simple as possible. There are two main commands to remember, zonecfg and
zoneadm. With these two tools you'll be able to create, install, boot, halt,
uninstall and delete your zones.
zonecfg and zoneadm provide a simple, yet powerful, interface to work with
Zones. We can get a list of the current Zones using the list subcommand to
zoneadm. An example of this can be seen in Figure 2.4. There are a couple of
things to note. First, there is always a global zone. The global zone is the main
machine and can see everything that happens in all other zones. You'll also
notice there is no ID assigned to the test zone. The Zone IDs are only assigned
after a Zone has been booted. These IDs can change depending on the order of
zone startup. All of the zone work we do will use the zone name which must be
unique.
Figure 2.4: Listing zones
# zoneadm list -cv
ID NAME STATUS PATH
0 global running /
- test configured /zones/test
There are two types of zones, whole and sparse root Zones: the di erence
between the two being the amount of data that is copied into the zone le
system. With a whole root zone all of the needed data is copied from the global
zone. With a sparse root zone the /usr, /sbin, /platform and /lib directories are
read-only loopback links to the global zone. Using a sparse root zone provides a
lot of disk savings over a whole root zone but with the drawback that you can't
install anything into the loopbacked le systems from within the local Zone.
The rst step in creating a zone is to create its conguration. This is done
with the zonecfg command. By supplying a non-existent zone name to zonecfg
we are prompted to create the new zone. The only required step when setting
up a zone is to set the zonepath attribute. A network interface is also setup in
Figure 2.5 using the net command.
Once the zone is created zoneadm list shows the zone to be in the congured
state. The next step, as seen in Figure 2.6, is to install the zone.
Once the zone is installed you use zoneadm boot to boot the zone. There
is an autoboot parameter that can be set in the zone conguration to have the
zone autoboot on system startup. The initial boot may take a bit of time as
the SMF repository is congured. After the initial boot you'll need to log into
the console using zlogin -C test zone and complete the nal conguration.
More information on zones can be found in the Solaris Administrators Guide:
Solaris Containers, Resource Management and Solaris Zones3 and the man
3http://docs.sun.com/doc/817-1592
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Figure 2.5: Zone creation
# zonecfg -z test_zone
test_zone: No such zone configured
Use 'create' to begin configuring a new zone.
zonecfg:test_zone> create
zonecfg:test_zone> set zonepath=/zones/test_zone
zonecfg:test_zone> add net
zonecfg:test_zone:net> set physical=bge0
zonecfg:test_zone:net> set address=192.168.1.44
zonecfg:test_zone:net> end
zonecfg:test_zone> info
zonepath: /zones
autoboot: false
pool:
inherit-pkg-dir:
dir: /lib
inherit-pkg-dir:
dir: /platform
inherit-pkg-dir:
dir: /sbin
inherit-pkg-dir:
dir: /usr
net:
address: 192.168.1.44
physical: bge0
zonecfg:test_zone> verify
zonecfg:test_zone> commit
zonecfg:test_zone> exit
# zoneadm list -cv
ID NAME STATUS PATH
0 global running /
- test_zone configured /zones/test_zone
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Figure 2.6: Zone installation
# zoneadm -z test_zone install
Preparing to install zone
.
Creating list of files to copy from the global zone.
Copying <2379> files to the zone.
Initializing zone product registry.
Determining zone package initialization order.
Preparing to initialize <1157> packages on the zone.
Initialized <1157> packages on zone.
Zone
is initialized.
The file
contains a log of the zone installation.
pages for zoneadm, zonecfg and zlogin.
DTrace
DTrace is the dynamic tracing tool built into Solaris 10. DTrace provides a tool
for both developers and system administrators to analyze their running system
and the applications executing on it. Because of its design, minimal impact
and safety as a requirement, DTrace can be safely used on a production system.
There is no need to reboot the system, restart the application or add any kind
of instrumentation.
The impact of enabling DTrace is typically minimal, unless you enable large
numbers of probes, and even then DTrace is designed to automatically halt
any of its scripts that cause excessive performance degradation. DTrace is also
designed with a dead-man in place. DTrace will kill itself if it sees performance
issues arising due to its usage.
DTrace is designed around the concept of providers and probes. A provider
is a high level grouping of probes. There is a default set of providers delivered
with Solaris 10 including networking, function boundary tracing, application
tracking and IO providers. There are also providers available for Java, Ruby,
PHP and other languages. It's also possible, although not required, to write
a provider for your application. Probes are the specic access points in the
application, library or kernel that you can watch and gather data.
When writing a DTrace script you'll be using the dtrace application. As
a simple starting point, Figure 2.7 is an example of using dtrace to get a list
of all available probes and a count of the number of probes on the system. A
typical machine can have upwards of 44000 probes available without looking at
application probes. Since none of these probes are enabled they don't utilize any
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CPU resources. As probes are enabled they are dynamically inserted into the
executing code allowing DTrace to have zero performance impact when disabled.
Figure 2.7: Listing DTrace probes
# dtrace -l
ID PROVIDER MODULE FUNCTION NAME
1 dtrace BEGIN
2 dtrace END
3 dtrace ERROR
4 syscall nosys entry
5 syscall nosys return
6 syscall rexit entry
7 syscall rexit return
8 syscall forkall entry
9 syscall forkall return
10 syscall read entry
11 syscall read return
12 syscall write entry
13 syscall write return
...
# dtrace -l | wc -l
44102
A DTrace script is made up of probes, predicates and actions. A probe is
the part of the system you wish to observe, (e.g. syscall::read:entry). Probes
are made up of four parts: provider:module:function:name. Predicates act like
"if" conditions. Actions are what we wish to do if the probe is red and the
predicate evaluates to true.
Figure 2.8 gives an example of counting the number of syscalls the executing
application is making. While this may seem a bit confusing at rst glance it
isn't too complicated. We use the -n
ag to dtrace to signal that we are going to
specify a probe name to trace. The probe we're interested in is syscall:::entry.
syscall:::entry will match all of the probes named "entry" in the syscall provider.
As you can see, if you leave part of the probe 4-tuple blank it will act as a wild-
card and match everything. You can also specify the "*" as a wild-card. (e.g.
open* will match open and open64). When the probe is red we store a count
into an associative array, @count, with the executable name, execname, as the
array key.
The count() function is part of what is called an aggregate. You can think
of aggregates like hash tables. There is a set of aggregate functions including
count(), quantize() and lquantize(). Aggregates make it easy to pull a lot of
data together without needing to store all data in memory.
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Figure 2.8: Counting syscalls per application
# dtrace -n 'syscall:::entry {@counts[execname] = count()}'
dtrace: description 'syscall:::entry ' matched 233 probes
^C
utmpd 2
snmpdx 2
snmpd 2
tsasim_exec 3
webservd 3182
appservd 4041
dataserver 20187
More information on DTrace can be found in the Solaris 10 Dynamic Tracing
Guide4 and the man page for dtrace.
ZFS
As of Solaris 10 6/06, ZFS is available to the public. ZFS provides another
option when selecting a le system to use with your Solaris machine along side
other available le systems such as: UFS, VxFS and QFS.
ZFS has been designed from the ground up to be simple, secure, provide
end-to-end data integrity and amazing scalability. Among its many features,
because of the disk write semantics the on-disk data is always consistent, even
over power failure. No need to ever run fsck. The on-disk data is endian agnostic,
take the disk out of an x86 machine and install it in a SPARC machine and it
will just work. More information on the features of ZFS can be seen in ZFS |
the last word in le systems5.
When working with ZFS you'll run into the terms pools and le systems. A
pool is a collection of disks that determine the amount of storage space available.
You can dynamically add and remove disks from pools. The disks in a pool can
be congured in a mirrored or raid-z array.
Lets look at a couple of simple examples of creating pools and le systems.
Figure 2.9 shows the simplest form of pool creation using a single disk.
Next, Figure 2.10 shows an example of creating a pool using a two disk
mirror.
4http://docs.sun.com/doc/817-6223
5http://www.sun.com/2004-0914/feature/
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Figure 2.9: Creating a ZFS pool
# zpool create tank c1t0d0
Figure 2.10: Creating a mirrored pool
# zpool create tank mirror c1t0d0 c1t1d0
Once the pool is created we can start creating le systems. File systems
are created on top of storage pools. File systems provide a point to apply
conguration parameters for di erent pieces of the storage pool. What does
that mean? Well, you could have one le system with compression enabled,
and one with it disabled. One could be NFS shared, one not. These attributes
are also inherited as le systems are added. These properties can be things
like the mount point, is the le system NFS shared, do we use compression,
among others. Some properties are also inherited down the le system hierarchy.
Setting compression on tank/home means that compression will also be enabled
on tank/home/dan. Figure 2.11 shows the creation of a le system hierarchy
and setting some properties.
Figure 2.11: Creating ZFS le systems and setting attributes
# zfs create tank/home
# zfs set mountpoint=/export/home tank/home
# zfs set sharenfs=on tank/home
# zfs set compression=on tank/home
# zfs create tank/home/dan
Because of the le system inheritance tank/home/dan will automatically be
NFS shared and mounted to /export/home/dan.
ZFS has built-in support for generating snapshots. A snapshot is a read-only
copy of le system or volume. Creation of snapshots is almost instantaneous
and since they use a copy-on-write model they'll initially consume no space in
the storage pool. Figure 2.12 shows some of the snapshot commands.
Figure 2.12 is doing three things. First, we're creating a snapshot named
friday of the tank/home/dan directory. Second, we can access the snapshot
by changing into the .zfs/snapshot directory at the root of the le system.
In this case, as we set the mount point to be /export/home/ we are looking
at /export/home/dan/.zfs/snapshot. We can then access the friday directory
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Figure 2.12: ZFS snapshots
# zfs snapshot tank/home/dan@friday
# ls /export/home/dan/.zfs/snapshot
friday
# zfs rollback tank/home/dan@friday
to retrieve les saved in the snapshot. Finally, we can rollback to a previous
snapshot using the zfs rollback command.
More information on the administration of ZFS can be found in the Solaris
ZFS Administration Guide6 along with the zfs(1m) and zpool(1m) man pages.
Predictive Self Healing
Tracking down the cause of, and solution too, any issues that arise on a server
can be a time consuming, and error prone, task. In order to simplify the task of
diagnosing and correcting these hardware and software faults Solaris 10 includes
a set of technologies referred too as Predictive Self Healing.
Predictive Self Healing is a new capability of Solaris 10 to isolate, diagnose
and recover from hardware and software faults. There are two main components
to Predictive Self Healing; the Solaris Fault Manager Software and the Solaris
Service Manager (SMF).
The Solaris Fault Manager Software is responsible for receiving all of the
error reports in the system and taking the appropriate action. This maybe
disabling a piece of errant software or an over-heating CPU.
The fault manager is made of a collection of diagnostic engines which are
responsible for this diagnosis.
More information on the Predictive Self Healing capabilities of Solaris 10
can be found in http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/availability.jsp.
6http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/zfsadmin.pdf
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Chapter 3
Command Di erences
Most Linux commands take two types of options, short form (-v) and long form
({version). Solaris commands, unless they're the GNU version, typically don't
implement the log forms. If a script is migrated from Linux to Solaris and
makes use of the long option format it will, most likely, require modication to
use either the GNU versions or to convert the options to their short form.
The Rosetta Stone website1 is a good resource for nding the equivalent
Solaris and Linux commands.
With the non-GNU implementation of commands there can be slight varia-
tions in the meaning and usage of options when compared to the Linux equiva-
lent. Some of these command di erences are listed below.
awk
Linux ships with GNU awk. Solaris ships with several versions of awk as listed
in Table 3.1. The default version is referred to as System V awk. GNU awk has
several extensions which aren't available with System V awk.
basename
The basic functionality of basename is the same between Linux and Solaris.
There are two basename implementations on Solaris. Of these two, /usr/ucb/bin/basename
is the same as the Linux version. /usr/bin/basename is enhanced such that you
can match a sux using a pattern as dened in expr(1).
1http://bhami.com/rosetta.html
19
Linux to Solaris Administrators Guide
Table 3.1: Solaris awk variations
/usr/bin/awk Standard System V awk
/usr/bin/nawk New awk. Has a number of features and extensions
over /usr/bin/awk
/usr/xpg4/bin/awk XPG4 compliant awk. XPG4 awk can be used
when porting awk scripts from Linux.
/opt/sfw/bin/gawk GNU awk. The awk distribution found on the
companion CD. gawk provides the highest degree
of compatibility with Linux awk. The Solaris 10
Companion CD ships with GNU awk version 3.0.6.
cat
The cat command, while similar, has a few variations between Linux and Solaris.
These di erences can be seen in Table 3.2.
Table 3.2: Linux vs Solaris cat arguments
Linux Solaris
-a, {show-all -vet
{number-nonblank -b
-e -ve
-E, {show-ends -ve
-s, {squeeze-blank -
-t -vt
-T, {show-tabs -vt
-u (ignored) -u (forces non bu ered output.)
{show-nonprinting -v
{help -
{version -
chown
Solaris ships with two versions of chown, /usr/bin/chown and /usr/ucb/chown.
The /usr/ucb/chown implementation only supports two options: -f and -R.
/usr/bin/chown, in addition to those supported by /usr/ucb/chown, supports
-h, -H, -L and -P. The implementations of the -f and -R
ags for both commands
are compatible with the Linux chown.
The -h option of /usr/bin/chown is compatible with the -h, or {no-dereference
option to chown on Linux. If a Linux script contains {no-dereference convert it
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to -h when porting to Solaris.
The denition of the additional
ags, -H, -L and -P can be seen in Table 3.3.
Table 3.3: Additional Solaris /usr/bin/chown arguments
-H If the le is a symbolic link referencing a directory,
the ownership of the directory and all les in the
le hierarchy below it are changed. If a symbolic
link is encountered, the owner of the target le is
changed, but no recursion takes place.
-L Same as -H but also a ects les. Any symbolic link
to a directory will be referenced and the directory
traversed.
-P If the le specied on the command line or en-
countered during the traversal of a le hierarchy
is a symbolic link this option changes the owner
of the symbolic link. This option does not follow
the symbolic link to any other part of the le hi-
erarchy. -P is similar to {no-dereference.
The implementation of chown on Linux also accepts several additional ar-
guments. These arguments can be seen in Table 3.4.
Table 3.4: Additional Linux chown arguments
-c or {changes Like verbose, but only reports when a change is
made.
{dereference A ects the referent of each symbolic link. This is
the default behaviour in Solaris. If a script uses
this option remove it when porting to Solaris.
{from= Only change the owner and/or group of each le if
its current owner and/or group match those speci-
ed. While there is no equivalent for this option in
Solaris, you can use nd with the -owner and/or
-group options and pass the results to chown.
df
Solaris supports several implementations of df. The simplest is /usr/ucb/df
which supports an additional -v option over /usr/ucb/df. The -v option is the
same as -k except that the sizes are displayed in multiples of the smallest block
size supported by each specied le system.
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/usr/xpg4/bin/df supports an additional -P
ag which has the same meaning
as -k except the sizes are listed in 512-byte units.
du
There are several di erences between the Linux du command and the Solaris
variant. A summary of these di erences is given in Table 3.5. Several du options
available on Linux have no Solaris equivalents. These can be seen in Table 3.6.
Table 3.5: Linux and Solaris du comparison
Linux Solaris /usr/bin Solaris xpg4 Solaris /usr/ucb
-a, {all -a -a a
{block-size=SIZE - - -
-b, {bytes - - -
-c, {total - - -
-D, {dereference-args -L -L -L
-h, {human-readable -h -h -h
-H, {si - - -
-k, {kilobytes -k -k -k
-l, {count-links - - -
-L, {dereference -L -L -L
-m, {megabytes - - -
-S, {separate-dirs -o - -
-s, {summmarize -s -s -s
-x, {one-le-system -d -x -d
-X FILE, {exclude-from=FILE - - -
{exclude=PAT - - -
{max-depth=N - - -
{help - - -
{version - - -
The meaning of the -H option di ers between Linux and Solaris. On Linux,
-H and -si mean the same thing, use powers of 1000 not 1024. The Solaris
meaning for the -H
ag is similar to that of the -L
ag on Linux.
ps
The /usr/ucb/ps executable is BSD compatible and takes the same command
line arguments as the Linux version of ps. The output on Solaris may di er
from the output on Linux.
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Table 3.6: Linux du options without Solaris equivalents
-b print size in bytes
{block-size=SIZE
-c produce a grand total
-l count links
-L dereference all symbolic links
-m megabytes
{exclude=PAT
{max-depth=N
{help
{version
setfacl
The /usr/bin/setfacl command is used for managing le Access Control Lists
(ACL). Although they perform the same function in Linux and Solaris, the
syntax and options are di erent.
The syntax for the Solaris implementation can be seen in Figure 3.1.
Figure 3.1: Solaris setfacl Syntax
setfacl [-r] -s acl_entries file
setfacl [-r] -md acl_entries file
setfacl [-r] -f acl_file file
The -s option sets a le's ACL. All old ACL entries are removed and replaced
with the newly specied ACL.
The -m option adds one or more new ACL entries to the le, and/or modies
one or more existing ACL entries on the le. It can also be used to replace an
existing ACL entry.
The -d option deletes one or more ACL entries from the le.
The -r option recalculates the ACL mask entry.
The format for an ACL entry is similar to the format in Linux. Linux sup-
ports the Solaris ACL entry format, while some Linux formats are not supported
by Solaris. The ACL formats seen in Figure 3.2 are supported by Solaris.
Linux accepts an additional colon (:) after the "other" and "mask" keywords,
while Solaris does not.
The perms are composed of the symbols "rwx" or a number (the same per-
mission numbers used with the chmod command). For example "r-x" is used
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Figure 3.2: Solaris ACL formats
[d[efault]:][u[ser]]:uid:perms
[d[efault]:][g[roup]]:gid:perms
[d[efault]:]o[ther]:perms
[d[efault]:]m[ask]:perms
to signify read and execute permissions. Linux support "rx" as an equivalent,
while Solaris treats this as an error.
Solaris setfacl supports the -f option which is absent in the Linux version
of setfacl. This option allows you to use another le's ACL as a reference for
setting a le's ACL.
The setfacl options listed in Table 3.7 are supported in Linux but have no
equivalent in Solaris.
Table 3.7: Linux setfacl options not available in Solaris
-b, {remove-all removes all ACL entries
-k, {remove-default removes the default ACL
-n, {no-mask Do not recalculate the e ective rights mask. This is equiv-
alent to the Solaris setfacl without the -r option. The ab-
sence of this option is equivalent to specifying the -r option
in Solaris.
{mask Recalculate the e ective rights mask. Equivalent to the -r
option in Solaris
-d, {default All operations apply to the Default ACL
{restore=le Restore permission backup created by "getfacl -R" or sim-
ilar
{test test mode
-R, {recursive Apply operations to all les and directories recursively
-L, {logical Logical walk, follow symbolic links
-P, {physical Physical walk, skip all symbolic links
{version Print the version of setfacl and exit
{help Print help explaining command line options
{ End of command line options
- If the le name parameter is a single dash, read a list of
les from standard input
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getfacl
The /usr/bin/getfacl command is used to display the Access Control Lists(ACL)
of les. Although they perform the same function and have similar output
formats in Linux and Solaris, they di er in the options they accept.
None of the long form options are supported under Solaris. In addition to
that, the following short form options are also not supported: -R, -L, -P, and -.
These options do not have any equivalents in Solaris.
tar
The implementation of tar included in Linux is GNU tar. Solaris uses System
V tar. These two implementations have many di erences. It is best to consult
their respective man pages rather than providing a lengthy discussion of these
di erences in this guide.
Notably missing in Solaris are the compression options (-Z, -z, -j). Solaris
tar does not support the use of an external compression programs.
Solaris does include an implementation of GNU tar in /usr/sfw/bin/gtar.
GNU tar is installed via the SUNWgtar package.
When porting Linux scripts that use tar to Solaris, you can either re-write
the tar command to use the equivalent Solaris tar options and use pipes to the
compression and decompression programs. Alternatively, if the target Solaris
system has the SUNWgtar package installed, the script can be modied to use
gtar instead of tar.
useradd
The useradd command in Linux is very similar to the same command on Solaris.
For the most part they operate identically and take most of the same options
which mean the same things. The Solaris version takes additional options to
support RBAC (see Hardening Tools for more information). One signicant
di erence is the meaning of the -p option. In Linux, this is used to specify
a password for the account on the command line; an unsafe practise that the
Linux version supports. In Solaris the -p option is used to specify the project
name to which all processes started by the user being created will belong.
Table 3.8 details the option di erences between Solaris and Linux.
For more information on the Solaris useradd, consult the useradd(1M) man-
page.
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Table 3.8: Linux and Solaris useradd di erences
Linux Solaris Meaning
-e expire date -e expire date User account expiration date.
Format of expire date di ers
between Linux and Solaris.
-f inactive -f inactive On Linux this is the number of days
after password expiry until the the
account is permanently disabled. In
Solaris this is the maximum number
of days allowed between uses of a
login ID before considering it invalid.
-M The users home directory will not be
created.
-m Users home directory will be
created if it doesn't already exist.
-n Create a group having the same name
as the user. In Solaris, use a
separate call to groupadd
-o -o Allow the user to be created with
non-unique user id.
-p passwd Specify the encrypted password as
returned by crypt(3).
-p prole Specify a project to which the user belongs.
-r Create a system account (a user with a
UID lower than the value of UID MIN
dened in /etc/login.defs). This is
a RedHat specic option.
-K key=value Set a key=value pair to add to the
users attributes.
-A authorization Authorizations to add to the user.
-P prole[,proles...] Proles to add to the user.
-D -e default expire date -D -e default expire date Set the default expiry date for
accounts created. Format of
default expire date di ers
between Linux and Solaris.
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groupadd
The groupadd command in Linux is very similar to the same command on So-
laris. For the most part they operate identically and take most of the same
options with the same meanings. Table 3.9 describes the di erences between
the implementations.
Table 3.9: Linux and Solaris groupadd di erences
Linux Solaris Meaning
-r Instructs groupadd to add a system account.
-f Force option. This is a RedHat specic option.
For more information on the Solaris groupadd, consult the groupadd(1M)
manpage.
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Chapter 4
Installation
This chapter will talk about three installation mechanisms, CD/DVD installa-
tion, network installation and
ash archives. We will also look at a mechanism
to upgrade an existing machine, live upgrade.
After reading this chapter you should be able to install Solaris onto an
existing machine.
Topics Covered
CD/DVD Media Installation
Network Installation
Flash Archives Live Upgrade
29
Linux to Solaris Administrators Guide
CD/DVD Media Installation
The most typical installation method for both Linux and Solaris is using the
provided, or downloaded1, installation media.
Installation of Linux typically involves the following steps:
Boot from CD.
Partition hard drives.
Select desired software packages.
Enter system conguration parameters.
A Solaris install will follow a similar pattern:
Boot from CD/DVD.
Enter system conguration parameters.
Select desired software packages.
Partition the hard drives.
There is nothing overly complex involved in a media based installation. Once
the required information is entered the system will be rebooted.
Network Installation
Unlike a media installation, the steps for a network installation di er between
Linux and Solaris. On Linux you would boot o a CD/DVD and then choose
the install media for your packages to be the URL of the host server. The install
program downloads the packages and installs them to the local system.
Solaris uses a technology called Jumpstart. You'll need a Jumpstart server
with a DHCP service running. The Jumpstart server will contain a copy of the
installation media (CD or DVD) on an NFS exported le system.
You'll need to know the MAC address of the host to be installed in order to
congure the Jumpstart server. Our example will use 00:0c:29:d5:c1:90.
First, we congure the Jumpstart server. This involves mounting the Solaris
install media and executing the setup install server finstall directoryg script.
The install directory parameter is the directory to copy the install image to on
1Solaris 10 is available at: http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/get.jsp
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Figure 4.1: DHCP conguration
Default settings for everything except as below.
Text le as the data store.
/var/dhcp as location for data store.
Do not manage host records.
Do not provide DNS domain nor name server information.
Network used is 172.16.129.0, netmask 255.255.255.0.
Network type is LAN and routing is using Router discovery protocol.
Do not provide NIS information.
Do not provide NIS+ information.
Starting address for DHCP clients is 172.16.129.100 { with 10 addresses
the Jumpstart server. setup install server is available in the Solaris 10/Tools
directory of the install media. If you're using CDs you'll be prompted to enter
the additional CDs as required.
With the Jumpstart server installed we need to congure the DHCP server.
This is done by executing /usr/sadm/admin/bin/dhcpmgr as root. This will
prompt you to enter the conguration for your DHCP server. An example
DHCP conguration is provided in Figure 4
If you execute svcs -a jgrep dhcp you should see that dhcp-server is enabled.
The last action is to tell the Jumpstart server and DHCP server about the
client to be installed. This is done by issuing add install client -d -e 00:0c:29:d5:c1:90
i86pc (assuming you're installing an x86 machine). If NFS or TFTP are not
enabled then add install client will congure them as needed. You can verify
these services are executing by using svcs -a jgrep nfs and inetadm jgrep tftp.
Follow the instructions provided by add install client to congure the DHCP
server, add a macro 01000C29D5C190 and assign:
Boot server IP (BootSrvA) : 172.16.129.10
Boot le (BootFile) : 01000C29D5C190
Then, using dhcpmgr, assign this macro (01000C29D5C190) to the DHCP
address range. With that, everything is congured.
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Depending if you're booting a SPARC or x86 machine the boot actions are
slightly di erent. On SPARC systems, the install client is booted from the
network and retrieves its hostname using rarp. It then retrieves and executes
a boot le. The boot le obtains the boot parameters from bootparamd. On
x86 systems, the DHCP server will tell the x86 PXE client the bootservers IP
and the boot le information. The root le system for the install client will be
mounted from the NFS server. The kernel is then loaded from this mounted le
system. With the kernel loaded the installation parameters will be obtained.
More information on network installations of Solaris 10 can be found on
page 119 of in the Solaris 10 Installation Guide: Network-Based Installations2.
Information on customizing and automating Jumpstart can be found in Solaris
10 Installation Guide: Custom JumpStart and Advanced Installations3. Infor-
mation on booting and installing Solaris over the Internet (WANboot) can be
found in Solaris 10 Installation Guide: Network-Based Installations Part III 4.
Flash Archives
If you have several systems that are clones of each other, similar conguration
and application installs, you can use Flash Archives to make installation simpler.
A
ash archive is a le that contains all the les from a reference system. The
reference system will have been previously installed and congured as required.
All machines installed from the
ash will be identical to the reference system,
a virtual clone of the master system.
More information on
ash archives can be found in Solaris 10 Installation
Guide: Solaris Flash Archives (Creation and Installation)5.
Live Upgrade
Live upgrade provides the ability to create alternate boot environments on a So-
laris host. You can then install updates into the alternate environment while the
current boot environment continues to execute. When the install is complete,
the system can be rebooted to the alternate boot environment.
Using live upgrade can reduce the downtime for installation and upgrade to
minutes. It also provides the ability to fall back to the previous boot environ-
ment in case of problems resulting from the upgrade.
More information on live upgrade can be found in Solaris 10 Installation
Guide: Solaris Live Upgrade and Upgrade Planning6.
2http://docs.sun.com/app.docs/doc/819-5776
3http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5778
4http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5776/6n7r9js52?a=view
5http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5779
6http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5777
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Chapter 5
Software Management
Any operating environment will require applications to be installed, and patches
applied. This chapter takes a look at the mechanisms to install packages on
Linux and Solaris and touches on the issue of patching a machine.
Topics Covered
RPM Packages
Solaris Packaging
Patching
33
Linux to Solaris Administrators Guide
RPM packages
Package management in RedHat or SUSE Linux is handled by the rpm com-
mand. Package installation is facilitated using rpm -i and package removal with
rpm -e.
Solaris Packaging
Solaris uses System V packages. To install packages you'll use pkgadd. Removal
is handled by pkgrm. Solaris also provides support for the rpm command.
Patching
In Linux, the concept of patching doesn't exist as it does in Solaris. In Linux
you would upgrade the given RPM to the next revision. There is no built in
mechanism in Linux to rollback a patch after it has been applied.
In Solaris you can use the patchadd and patchrm commands to handle the
application and removal of patches. Patches are available on the SunSolve1
website. While some patches require a support contract, critical patches are
available for free. Each patch le contains all of the changes that must be
applied, or rolled back, as a bundle.
On a RedHat system you can use up2date to handle any package version
changes required to update to the latest revision of a package.
There are two separate commands available on Solaris to handle these up-
grades. updatemanager provides a GUI environment to manage the application
and rollback of patches, while the smpatch application provides a command line
interface to the same functionality.
1http://sunsolve.sun.com
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Chapter 6
System Management
The management of a Solaris system is quite similar to that of a Linux system.
Often the commands used are the same, or, in the case of printing, the subsystem
is the same. This can aid in the move from Linux to Solaris as the experience
gained on Linux is directly applicable on Solaris.
This chapter will attempt to go through some of the aspects of system man-
agement and highlight some of the similarities and di erences between Linux
and Solaris.
Topics Covered
Booting, Shutdown and Run Levels
System Services
User/Group Management
Printer and Printing Management
File System Management
Disk and Volume Management
Network Management
Remote Management
Kernel Conguration
35
Linux to Solaris Administrators Guide
Booting, Shutdown and Run Levels
Up to Solaris 9 the boot procedures between Linux and Solaris were very similar.
Both systems provided the concept of run levels that were used to dene what
services were started and stopped at each level. The init command was used to
switch between these run levels.
Table 6.1 lists the traditional run levels seen on a Linux system.
Table 6.1: Linux run levels
0 halt
1 single user
2-5 multi user
6 reboot
Solaris machines up to Solaris 9 used a set of run levels as shown in Table
6.2.
Table 6.2: Solaris run levels before Solaris 10
S, s or 1 single user state
0 halt
2 multi-user no network services
3 multi-user with network services
4 unused
5 power o
6 reboot
With Solaris 10, and the inclusion of SMF, the run levels have been replaced
by milestones. Table 6.3 lists the default set of milestones.
Table 6.3: Solaris 10 milestones
syscong
devices
single-user Equivalent to run level 1.
network
name-services
multi-user Equivalent to run level 2 in previous Solaris versions.
multi-user-server Equivalent to run level 3 in previous Solaris versions.
Solaris 10 still provides a limited set of run levels as seen in Table 6.4. As in
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previous versions of Solaris, and with Linux, you can use init to switch to any
one of these levels.
Table 6.4: Solaris 10 run levels
0 halt
1, s, or S single user
5 power o
6 reboot
Two other commands are available to manipulate the current system state
on Solaris, the reboot and halt commands. These commands will restart or halt
the system, respectively. It should be noted that when using these commands
the system will not go through the normal shutdown procedures. Services are
not stopped. Processes are simply killed, le systems unmounted and the system
rebooted or halted.
The recommended method to reboot or halt the system is to use init.
System Services
When using a Linux system, unless run from inittab with the respawn attribute,
system services will not be respawned if they're killed or terminate abnormally.
With Solaris 10, and the addition of SMF, it isn't possible to simply kill a
system service as it will be automatically restarted by SMF. You have to use
the svcadm commands to disable or enable the service.
Services that would be handled by xinetd on Linux are managed by SMF
in Solaris 10. When editing the services available through inetd you will edit
the /etc/inet/inetd.conf le. You must then execute inetconv to create the
corresponding service entries in SMF. All control of the inetd services will now
be done through inetadm or svcadm.
On a Linux system the typical places to congure services are listed in Table
6.5.
Table 6.5: Linux services conguration locations
/etc/inittab To be controlled by init.
/etc/rc*.d Run level specic scripts that start system services.
/etc/(x)inetd.conf Controlled by inetd.
On Solaris those locations are listed in Table 6.6.
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Table 6.6: Solaris services conguration locations
/etc/inittab To be controlled by init. Not recommended in Solaris 10.
/etc/rc?.d, /etc/init.d Run level specic scripts that start system services.
/etc/inetd.conf Controlled by inetd; in Solaris 10, use SMF and inetadm.
SMF Solaris 10 only.
User/Group Management
Solaris extends the useradd and groupadd commands as seen in Linux to pro-
vide extensions to manage RBAC-related properties. Other options may di er
between Linux and Solaris.
Along with useradd and groupadd Solaris also provides smuser and smgroup
to manage accounts and groups in a name server, such as NIS. These two com-
mands are part of the Solaris Management Console (SMC). smc is also available
as a graphical environment to manage users and groups.
Printing and Printer Management
Most Linux systems provide CUPS to handle their printing and printer man-
agement. Solaris 10 includes CUPS as well, making it compatible with Linux
systems.
Prior to Solaris 10, Solaris used System V printing. The System V printing
system provided the commands given in Table 6.7 to interact with the print
system.
Table 6.7: System V print commands
lpadmin Modify printing system parameters.
lpsched Start the print server (/usr/lib/lp/lpsched).
lpshut Stop the print server.
cancel Cancel print jobs.
lpmove Move print jobs to another printer.
lp Submit a print job.
lpstat Display the status of printers and/or print jobs.
Print system conguration was stored in /etc/printers.conf, printers NIS
map, the users $HOME/.printers, the $PRINTER and the $LPDEST environ-
ment variables.
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A graphical interface for setting up printers in Solaris 10 is printmgr. This
is similar to the GNOME printer management command gnome-cups-manager
available on most Linux systems. The printmgr command resides in /usr/sadm/admin/bin/printmgr.
/usr/sbin/printmgr exists as a symbolic link to it.
File System Management
Solaris supports a wide variety of le system types to support most storage
media (CDs, DVDs, Hard Drives,
oppy disks,
ash based storage) and network
based le system protocols. Solaris also uses le systems to implement various
system interface features, and to export some kernel information as les visible
to the user (ie. /etc/mnttab). Table 6.8 shows the various le system types
supported under Solaris 10. In addition to the native supported le system,
third party software vendors also provide le systems; for example, Veritas
provides the vxfs le system.
Table 6.8: File System Types
autofs Automount File System.
cachefs Caching File System.
ctfs Contract File System.
devfs Devices File System.
fd File Descriptor File System.
hsfs High Sierra File System (CDs).
lofs Loopback Virtual File System.
mntfs Mount Table File System (/etc/mnnttab).
nfs Network File System.
objfs Kernel Object File System.
pcfs DOS formatted le system.
proc /proc File System.
qfs Distributed le system.
sam-fs Archive management and retrieval.
tmpfs Memory based le system (/tmp).
udfs Universal Disk Format File System (DVDs).
ufs Unix File System.
volfs Volume Management File System.
xmemfs Extended Memory File System.
In Solaris, le systems are mounted using the mount(1M) command. Linux
places the mount command in /bin. In Solaris this command is located in
/usr/sbin. The le system type is provided to the Linux mount command using
the -t vfstype option. The equivalent option for the Solaris mount command is
-F FSType.
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Loopback Devices
Loopback devices provide a mechanism that allow mounting of disk images as
le systems. (They are also used in Solaris to handle the loopback le system
mounts in zones.)
When mounting a loopback device on Linux you would use a command
similar to mount -o loop /path/to/disk/image /mountpoint. This would mount
the image /path/to/disk/image to the directory /mountpoint.
On Solaris, instead of mounting the disk image directly you'll use loadm
to create a loopback device that will then be mounted. Execute loadm -a
/path/to/disk/image which will produce a /dev/lo/X device. This device is
then used to mount the le system, mount -F FSType /dev/lo/X /mountpoint.
You will need to provide the proper -F FSType option to the Solaris mount
command. The FSType provided should match the le system found in the
disk image. For example if the disk image is an ISO image of a CD, you would
use mount -F hsfs /dev/lo/X /mountpoint.
File System Quotas
There are three main commands to work with le system quotas on Solaris. Of
the three, only quot is unique to Solaris. quot will list the le system usage per
system user.
The other two commands, edquota and quota, while being named the same
as their Linux counterparts, have di ering options and behaviour.
Disk and Volume Management
Disk Management
There are two main commands used to work with disks on Solaris, fdisk and
format. The fdisk command (on x86 systems) is used to create a partition on
the disk. Solaris partitions have type 0x82, which is the same as the Linux
SWAP partition. This may cause issues when dual booting an x86 machine
with Solaris.
Solaris uses a single partition with type 0x82 then uses Sun disk labels within
the partition to split it further into slices. This slicing is done with the format
command.
As of Solaris 10 6/06 the partition type 0x82 is depreciated. A new type,
0xbf, is now used as the partition type for Solaris (this is the Solaris2 type).
Solaris will continue to recognize the older 0x82 (solaris) ID. Older non-Solaris
partitioning software may not yet recognize the 0xbf partition type.
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format is used to slice up Solaris fdisk partitions (on x86 systems) or disks
(SPARC) into Solaris slices. format will present the user with a list of disks to
manage. All disks recognized by the system are listed. Once a disk is selected,
the part command can be used to partition it into slices.
Volume Management
Volume management on Linux is controlled using the vg* and lv* commands.
If you aren't using ZFS, then Solaris uses a set of metadevices for volume
management. These metadevices are maintained using the meta* commands
given in Table 6.9.
Table 6.9: Metadevice commands
metadb Creates and manages meta device databases.
metainit Initializes metadevices.
metattach Used to attach a metadevice to a mirror and to
attach space to a soft partition.
metadetach Used to detach a metadevice from a mirror.
metahs Used to manage hotspare pools.
metaoine Place submirrors oine.
metaonline Place submirrors online.
metaparam Modify parameters of metadevices.
metarecover Recover soft partition information.
metarename Renames a metadevice.
metareplace Enable or replace components of submirrors or
RAID5 metadevices.
metaset Congure shared disksets.
metastat Display status of metadevice or hot spare pool.
metaclear Delete active metadevices and hot spare pools.
metadevadm Updates metadevice information.
metasync Performs metadevice resync during reboot.
Network Management
There are commands, as seen in Table 6.10, and les, as seen in Table 6.11,
which are involved in the conguration of networking on a Solaris host.
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Table 6.10: Networking tools
ifcong Congure interfaces and devices.
route Congure network routes.
netstat Display network conguration and connection sta-
tus.
ndd Get/set conguration parameters in select kernel
drivers.
Table 6.11: Networking conguration les
/etc/hostname.[interface name] Each network interface has a corresponding le
which indicates the hostname to use for assign-
ing IP addresses to the interface. Also used to
indicate that a network interface is to use DHCP.
/etc/nodename Hostname of the system.
/etc/hosts Static table of IP addresses.
/etc/defaultrouter IP address of the default router.
/etc/netmasks Table of default netmasks for various networks.
/etc/networks Table of networks and their names.
/etc/dhcp.[interface name] DHCP parameters for interface.
/etc/resolv.conf DNS client conguration.
/etc/nsswitch.conf Name service switch le. Used to select the source
for various network information parameters.
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Remote Management
Solaris comes bundled with both telnet and ssh to handle remote system access.
These services can be enabled and disabled with SMF as needed.
In addition to the command line access you can also use the SMC GUI to
manage a remote Solaris host.
Kernel Conguration
Making kernel conguration changes di ers between Solaris and Linux. On a
Linux system you may need to modify the source, do runtime modications to
entries in /proc, use sysctl or load kernel modules. On Solaris you may need to
modify /etc/system, load kernel modules, run utilities such as ndd, use DTrace
or adb.
/etc/system is the kernel conguration le. This le is loaded at boot time
by the kernel and the kernel behaviour is in
uenced by the settings in this le.
You can in
uence general kernel behaviour, including paging, swapping, pro-
cess sizing, le system
ushing, kernel memory allocation, scheduling, TCP/IP
parameters, among others. You can also force certain kernel modules or device
drivers to be loaded at boot time. Parameters passed to device driver modules
can also be congured by setting up values in /etc/system. Since this le is only
read once at boot time, changes do not take e ect until after a system reboots.
For more information on kernel tuning using /etc/system consult the sys-
tem(4) man page and the Solaris Tunable Parameters Reference Manual1.
Loading Kernel Modules
Kernel modules are binary les that contain kernel code. These usually imple-
ment some sort of device driver, le system, system call, or some other kernel
level functionality. These modules may be loaded and unloaded throughout the
lifetime of the OS. The kernels functionality can be modied by loading in a
module. For example a new le system can be supported by loading in a kernel
module that implements that le system. The command to load kernel modules
is modload. To remove a kernel module from the running kernel, the modun-
load command is used. The modinfo command allows the user to view what
modules are currently loaded on the system. These commands are the Solaris
counterparts to the modprobe, insmod, rmmod, and lsmod commands on Linux.
See modload(1M), modunload(1M), and modinfo(1M).
1http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-2724
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Kernel tuning Commands
There are some tuning parameters that can be modied using commands. For
example, ndd is a utility for modifying the behaviour of network interfaces.
With ndd you can change the conguration of your network interface (from half
duplex to full duplex, for example). You can also change the way the TCP/IP
stack in solaris behaves. Consult ndd(1M) for details.
In the previous section /etc/system was mentioned as a way to modify kernel
variables. However /etc/system modications required a system restart to take
e ect. adb and dtrace are utilities that can allow you to directly modify kernel
parameters while the system is running. Their e ects are immediate. These
should be used with care as errors could prove to be fatal to the running kernel.
More information on kernel tuning for Solaris can be found in the Solaris
Tunable Parameters Reference Manual2.
2http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0404
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Chapter 7
Device Management
Adding and removing devices from machines has become commonplace with the
advent of USB drives, external hard drives, digital cameras and other portable
devices. This chapter takes a look at how Solaris handles these devices.
Topics Covered
Device Naming and Access
Adding/Removing Devices
Removable Media
Tape Drives
Terminals, Modems and Serial Ports
45
Linux to Solaris Administrators Guide
Device Naming and Access
On Linux the /dev directory stores all of the device les needed for the system.
There is also a selection of TTY devices named /dev/pty*. Each disk available
on the system will appear in /dev with a name of /dev/sd[a-z] for SCSI disks
and /dev/hd[a-z] for IDE disks. Partitions are indicated by /dev/sdaN where
N is the partition number. The /dev directory can be considered
at, with all
of the device nodes at the save level in the directory.
Although similar, the /dev directory on Solaris has some signicant varia-
tions. /dev on Solaris does not contain any device les. Instead, all entries are
symlinks to the /devices directory. Solaris /dev is also set out in a hierarchy.
There are sub-directories for di erent types of devices: dsk, rdsk, pts, cua and
rmt.
Disk and TTY devices are also named slightly di erently. TTYs are named
using the form /dev/pts/*. Solaris uses controller, target, device, slice to address
partitions on a disk. (e.g./dev/dsk/cAtBdCsD where A is the controller number,
B is the SCSI target ID, C is the lun, and D is the slice number with 0 as the
rst slice.)
There are no devices on Solaris that point to the disks themselves. All
disk devices point to a slice of the disk. Slice 2, typically, is a special slice
that overlaps all other partitions starting from cylinder 0 and encompassing the
entire disk.
Adding/Removing Devices
Linux uses modload and modunload to add and remove devices. A static kernel
will require that the device driver has been compiled into the monolithic kernel
and initialized at boot.
On Solaris 8 and older systems you would use the adddrv command to add
and remove devices. With Solaris 9 and newer systems the devfsadm command
is used. devfsadm -C can be used to clean up stale /dev entries. The /devices
tree re
ects what the OpenBoot Prompt (OBP) saw at system boot time.
As with any Linux distrobution the latest Solaris release will have the most
comprehensive driver support available.
Removable Media
Removable devices in Solaris are controlled by the volume manager vold. vold
is started at boot using /etc/init.d/volmgt.
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When
oppies are inserted they are automatically mounted to /
oppy and
create two devices: a block device, /vol/dev/diskette0, and a raw device, /vol/dev/rdiskette0.
CDs and DVDs work in a similar fashion to
oppies. They are automounted
to /cdrom and create device nodes in /vol/dev/dsk and /vol/dev/rdsk for block
and raw access respectively.
Tape Drives
SCSI tapes are represented by device les in /dev/rmt. The device les have
the form of /dev/rmt/N[lmhuc][b][n] so follows:
N The device number, 0 for rst tape on the system.
lmhuc Density (low, medium, high, ultra/compressed).
b BSD behavior (whether the fsb or fsf mt commands
point to the end of the previous le (fsb), or the
beginning of the current le (fsb), end of current le
(fsf), or beginning of next le (fsf)).
Terminals, Modems and Serial Ports
There are a couple of typical Linux tools for working with terminals and modems
connected to serial ports. They are minicom and seyon for working with ports
and setserial for working with serial ports.
The main Solaris tool is tip which is used to connect to serial ports. tip can
be congured via /etc/remote and the $HOME/.tiprc le.
Serial port speed, parity and handshaking is performed via the eeprom com-
mand.
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Chapter 8
Security and Hardening
Any system that is hooked up to a network needs to be secured. Security is
a multi-faceted task, from the initial hardening to auditing for patches and
vulnerabilities.
This chapter presents some of the options for hardening and auditing a
Solaris machine.
Topics Covered
Hardening Tools
Least Privileges
Auditing Tools
Securing and Removing Services
Kernel Tuning for Security
49
Linux to Solaris Administrators Guide
Hardening Tools
There are several di erent tools available for the hardening of a Solaris machine.
These facilities range from TCP Wrappers, included in Solaris 9 and 10 with the
SUNWtcpd package, to allow for the tight control of incoming TCP connections
to the RBAC and BART tools listed below.
Solaris Security Toolkit
The Solaris Security Toolkit (previously know as the Jumpstart Architecture
and Security Scripts, JASS), provides an automated, extensible and scalable
mechanism to maintain a secure Solaris system. The JASS scripts allow you to
audit and harden your Solaris installation.
More information on JASS can be found at: http://www.sun.com/software/security/jass/.
RBAC
The Role Based Access Control (RBAC) facility allows the system administrator
to assign roles and privileges to users on the system. This allows the admin to
provide access to facilities of the system that would traditionally require root
access.
More information on RBAC can be found in rbac(1) and in
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/least privilege.html.
BART
The Basic Auditing and Reporting Tool (BART) is designed to monitor your
le system and look for changes in le contents. BART does this by looking at
all of the les on the system and recording information about each one.
BART, although less robust, is similar to the commercially available Tripwire
application.
More information on BART can be found in bart(1M).
Least Privileges
There are typically a large number of processes executing on a UNIX box with
full root privileges as they need to access devices, modify other processes, work
with restricted les or access other root restricted resources.
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Having all of these processes with root privileges around can pose a security
risk. If any of those applications is hacked the user could gain full root privileges
on the system.
This is where the Least Privileges capabilities of Solaris 10 come into play.
The least privileges feature allows you to remove any system privileges from an
application that are not required for its normal operation. There are around 50
privileges that can be set on a process.
More information on the least privileges capabilities of Solaris 10 and the
available privileges can be found in privileges(5) and
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/least privilege.html.
Auditing Tools
Many of the auditing tools available on Linux are also available on Solaris. This
includes tripwire1, used to monitor changes to important les. crack2 and John
the Ripper3 are also available to check for weak passwords..
Securing and Removing Services
The processes of hardening a Linux or Solaris 9 and prior machines is actually
quite similar. For any service you don't wish to start you just remove the
relevant les from /etc/rc*.d. For any inet les you'll need to remove them from
the inetd conguration. On Solaris this le would be stored at /etc/inetd.conf.
With Solaris 10, for any service to be disabled you will use the svcadm disable
fservice nameg and inetadm -d fservice nameg to set them as disabled in the
SMF repository. See Section 2 for more information on SMF.
Kernel Tuning for Security
Solaris provides two ways to guard against stack based bu er over
ows. The rst
is done globally by setting noexec user stack into /etc/system. All applications
that run will have the option set. If you don't wish to do this globally an
individual application can link with the /usr/lib/ld/map.noexstk map le.
More information on the noexec user stack /etc/system option can be found
in: Solaris Tunable Parameters Reference Manual 4.
1http://www.sun.com/software/security/tripwire/
2ftp://ftp.cert.dfn.de/pub/tools/password/Crack/
3http://www.openwall.com/john/
4http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-0404/6mg74vs9h?a=view
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Chapter 9
Monitoring and
Performance
It is often necessary to monitor your systems to determine the CPU, memory,
disk or network load. There are several tools available on Solaris to aid in this
monitoring and analysis. Along with the tools listed in this chapter there are
several resources for DTrace scripts available that can aid system monitoring
and performance tuning. The OpenSolaris DTrace community1 is a good source
for these scripts.
This chapter will look at a few of the available tools and their usage.
Topics Covered
Processors
Memory
Network
Disks, Volumes and File Systems
System and User Processes
Input/Output
1http://opensolaris.org/os/community/dtrace/scripts/
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Linux to Solaris Administrators Guide
Processors
Information on the current processors in the system can be retrieved using the
psrinfo command. An example of the psrinfo output can be seen in Figure 9.1.
Figure 9.1: psrinfo and psrinfo -v
# psrinfo
0 on-line since 09/28/2006 19:49:33
# psrinfo -v
Status of virtual processor 0 as of: 09/29/2006 02:06:34
on-line since 09/28/2006 19:49:33.
The i386 processor operates at 1733 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.
The mpstat command can be used to gather per-processor statistics on the
system. The output data will contain one line per processor. Figure 9.2 shows
example output from mpstat.
Figure 9.2: mpstat 1 3 output
# mpstat 1 3
CPU minf mjf xcal intr ithr csw icsw migr smtx srw syscl usr sys wt idl
0 1305 3 0 394 294 403 38 0 0 0 1554 7 3 0 90
0 10 0 0 358 258 205 0 0 0 0 250 1 1 0 98
0 0 0 0 345 245 186 0 0 0 0 195 1 0 0 99
A eld of note in the mpstat output is xcal, if you have multiple CPUs.
This will be the number of inter-processor cross-calls. csw is the number of
context switches. syscl is the number of system calls that happened on the
processor. usr, sys and idl give the amount of user time, system time and idle
time respectively. The wt column is a legacy artifact and will always return 0
on Solaris 10.
The kstat command can also be used to gather information on the proces-
sors. By providing the -m cpu option to kstat you will retrieve all the CPU
information. Figure 9.3 shows an example of this usage.
Memory
The vmstat command can be used to display information on the system's virtual
memory subsystem. vmstat gives information on the current swap and memory,
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Figure 9.3: kstat -m cpu output
# kstat -m cpu
module: cpu instance: 0
name: intrstat class: misc
crtime 6.573712134
level-1-count 1214737
level-1-time 3558707908
level-10-count 2364949
...
page faults, disk stats and fault information. Figure 9.4 shows example vmstat
output.
Figure 9.4: vmstat 2 5
# vmstat 2 5
kthr memory page disk faults cpu
r b w swap free re mf pi po fr de sr cd f0 s0 -- in sy cs us sy id
0 0 0 1998572 1101884 8 29 14 0 1 0 35 8 0 0 0 397 865 412 5 1 94
0 0 0 1913292 1014728 0 22 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 364 204 207 1 0 99
0 0 0 1913292 1014728 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 356 162 184 1 0 99
kstat can be used to gather memory information. The memory module is
vmem. Figure 9.5 shows example output.
Figure 9.5: kstat -m vmem
# kstat -m vmem
module: vmem instance: 1
name: heap class: vmem
alloc 4632
contains 0
contains_search 0
crtime 0
Network
The netstat command can be used to gather network status information. netstat
can retrieve information on the active network sockets, various network data
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structures, STREAMS memory statistics, interface states, routing tables and
DHCP information.
You can use kstat to query information on each network interface driver in
the system. In my case, I'm using the bge driver. Figure 9.6 is an example of
the output.
Figure 9.6: kstat -m bge
# kstat -m bge
module: bge instance: 0
name: bge0 class: net
brdcstrcv 16059
brdcstxmt 14
collisions 65
crtime 128.886063641
ierrors 0
ifspeed 100000000
ipackets 33976
Disks, Volumes and File Systems
The df command displays information on the size, used and available space of
the mounted le systems. Figure 9.7 shows example df output.
Figure 9.7: df -h
# df -h
Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c0d0s0 9.6G 3.1G 6.4G 33% /
/devices 0K 0K 0K 0% /devices
ctfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/contract
The du command can be to summarize disk usage information. du will
output the size of each le and each directory as it walks the le system from
the given starting directory.
metastat can be used to display metadevice or hot spare pool information.
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System and User Processes
System information can be gathered with the prstat command. prstat shows
process and thread information. prstat is similar to the top command. top
is also available for Solaris as part of the Companion CD. Figure 9.8 shows
example output from prstat.
Figure 9.8: prstat
PID USERNAME SIZE RSS STATE PRI NICE TIME CPU PROCESS/NLWP
533 dj2 36M 62M sleep 59 0 0:03:45 3.8% Xorg/1
627 dj2 62M 17M run 49 0 0:00:16 0.5% gnome-terminal/2
577 dj2 17M 11M sleep 59 0 0:00:41 0.3% enlightenment/1
873 dj2 3972K 2740K sleep 59 0 0:00:00 0.2% vim/1
Input/Output
The iostat command can be used to display information on the di erent IO
devices in the system. This can include hard drives, TTY devices, NFS mounts
and other devices. Example iostat output can be seen in 9.9.
Figure 9.9: iostat 2 5
# iostat 2 5
tty cmdk0 sd0 nfs1 nfs2 cpu
tin tout kps tps serv kps tps serv kps tps serv kps tps serv us sy wt id
1 140 48 8 8 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5 1 0 94
0 117 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 99
0 40 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 99
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Chapter 10
Backup and Restore
Hard drives fail. People do silly things. Lightning strikes. These reasons and
many more just drive home the fact that everyone should be backing up their
data.
This chapter will give some information on di erent backup and restore
utilities in Solaris as compared to Linux.
Topics Covered
File System Backup and Restore
Compression Tools
File System Snapshots
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Linux to Solaris Administrators Guide
File System Backup and Restore
When backing up and restoring le systems on Linux you'll typically use the
dump and restore commands.
Similarly, on Solaris you'll use the ufsdump and ufsrestore commands to
backup UFS le systems. For ZFS le systems see Section 10, File System
Snapshots.
There are many other backup tools that are used on Linux systems. Tar
and cpio are examples of these tools that some use. They are also available on
Solaris.
There are also a variety of open source backup tools, such as Amanda, that
are popular in Linux circles. Just like most open source tools, Amanda can also
be used in Solaris.
Sun also delivers The Sun StorageTek Enterprise Backup software and other
associated storage management tools. Sun also resells Legato Networker and
IBM Tivoli. There are many other third party backup software available on the
Solaris platform.
Compression Tools
The three most common compression tools bzip, gzip and zip are all available
on Solaris. You should conrm the options have not been changed.
File System Snapshots
Snapshots of the UFS le system can be taken using the fssnap utility. When
using ZFS snapshots can be taken using the zfs command. A command similar
to zfs snapshot tank/home@monday will produce a snapshot called monday.
You can then take this snapshot data and write it to tape using:
zfs send tank/home@monday > /dev/rmt/0
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Chapter 11
Troubleshooting
If Murphy is to believed, something will always go wrong. This chapter is here
to help you out when that something happens. Following is a selection of issues
and guidance to aid you in solving some issues you may encounter.
Topics Covered
Installation
System Startup
Core Files
Kernel Crash Dumps
Logs
Permissions and File Access Problems
Missing Commands
Printing
File Systems
Root Password Recovery
Network
Diagnostic and Debugging Tools
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Installation
Installing from a USB CDROM drive
Installing Solaris 10 onto an x86 system from a bootable USB CDROM doesn't
always complete successfully. Occasionally the system will lose track of the USB
CDROM being used to install. If this happens the following should help rectify
the problem.
1. During installation, select the Solaris Interactive Text (Console session)
install type. Continue until the install drops to a shell with the message:
ERROR: The disc you inserted is not a Solaris OS CD/DVD
2. Check, and remember, the list of available devices in /dev/dsk.
3. Unplug the USB CDROM and plug it back in after a few seconds.
4. Check for the newly recognized device (e.g. c1t0d0XXXX).
5. Mount the USB CDROM mount -F hsfs /dev/dsk/c1t0d0p0 /cdrom, re-
member it must be p0 (partition 0).
6. Run /sbin/install-solaris to continue.
System Startup
If you run into issues with system startup there are a few places you can look
for information. First, svcs -x will list any services that were not started, or
that were oined by the system. There will also be pointers to log les and
other information to aid in correcting issues.
The next place to look is the /var/adm/message le. This le contains all
the log messages for the system. Failing that, verify that any scripts being
executed from /etc/rc*.d complete without issue.
Cannot mount boot archive
If you receive a panic: cannot mount boot archive message while booting
then you've somehow lost your boot archive. This can happen if you install
multiple patches simultaneously that require rebuilding of the boot archive.
In order to correct this situation you'll need to boot the system into failsafe
mode. Failsafe mode will normally prompt you to update the boot archive. If
this is the case, reboot and you should be ne.
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Otherwise, check if the original root partition is already mounted on /a,
if not, mount it to /a. (e.g. mount -F ufs /dev/dsk/c1d0s0 /a). Once the
partition is mounted issue /a/boot/solaris/bin/create ramdisk -R /a to rebuild
the boot archive.
Reboot and the issue should be corrected.
Core Files
Core les are created when a system exits abnormally. Cores can be quite useful
in determining the issue that caused the application to terminate. The coreadm
utility allows you to modify the location, name and contents of core dump les
produced on Solaris.
There are also several applications available to extract information from a
core le. Some of these applications are listed in Table 11.1.
Table 11.1: Core le utilities
p
ags Print tracing
ags.
pcred Print credentials.
pldd List dynamic libraries linked into the process.
pstack Print a hex and symbolic stack trace for each LWP
in the process.
Kernel Crash Dumps
If a kernel panic happens on a Linux machine an oops message will appear which
can be decoded to determine the cause of the issue. There are no actual crash
dump les produced by the Linux kernel.
If the Solaris kernel panics, a crash dump le will be written to /var/crash/hostname.
This crash dump le can be used in post-mortem analysis of why the system
crashed.
Logs
When trouble occurs it is often a good idea to take a look at the log les as the
rst step to diagnosing the issue. Depending on the desired information there
are a few di erent places to look. /var/adm/messages contains the main system
logs. /var/log/syslog contains Sendmail logs, among others. /var/cron/log will
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contain information from the cron service. Finally, /var/lp/logs/lpsched will
contain the printer server logs.
There are also some application specic log les, for example:
/var/samba/log
/var/apache/log
/var/apache2/log
Missing Commands
Commands may exist in di erent directories, may need to be installed, or may
need to be ported if unavailable.
First, check the $PATH variable of your shell to verify all of the needed direc-
tories are present. The command could exist in one, or many, of the directories
listed in Tables 1.2 or 1.3.
If the command isn't installed you can attempt to install a freeware package
of the software. This could be retrieved from the Companion CD, sunfree-
ware.com, blastwave.org or installed from a source distribution.
If the tool doesn't exist on Solaris you may be required to port the original
tool or write your own variation.
Printing
File Systems
Root Password Recovery
If you've managed to forget the root password for your Solaris box, or inherited
a box without being told the password, it is possible to recover the box without
having to re-install.
Boot from the Solaris install CD, then when it starts exit out of the install
process. Mount the root disk to /a, modify /a/etc/passwd and /a/etc/shadow.
Reboot the system and the password should be changed.
Network
If you're having trouble with the network connections, Table 11.2 lists a few
commands that may be of service.
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Table 11.2: Useful networking commands
traceroute To trace the route a packet takes to reach its des-
tination.
/usr/sbin/ping To test if remote hosts are reachable.
ifcong To view network interface conguration.
netstat To show network status.
snoop Similar to tcpdump.
tcpdump Available on the companion CD.
Controlling NFS versions supported
In some circumstances, mounting a le system exported from a Linux system
to a Solaris 10 system, the following error message may be encountered:
$ mount linux-nfs-server:/export /mnt
nfs mount: mount: /mnt: Not owner
This occurs because the Solaris 10 NFS client uses the NFSv4 protocol to
mount the le system, and the Linux NFS client does not support NFSv4.
The solution to this problem is to change the default NFS client proto-
col that the Solaris system will use to the NFSv3 protocol. To do this, edit
/etc/default/nfs and add the line NFS CLIENT VERSMAX=3 to instruct So-
laris to use the NFSv3 protocol until the Linux nfs server software is upgraded
to support NFSv4.
If for some reason you want the Solaris nfs server not to support NFSv4, you
can do this by modifying /etc/default/nfs to indicate NFS SERVER VERSMAX=3
The Solaris system will now only support up to version 3 of the NFS protocol.
Diagnostic and Debugging Tools
DTrace is a powerful new tool available in Solaris 10 to make the process of
diagnosing system issues easier. DTrace can probe into all aspects of the system
including network, IO, function calls and when applications go on and o the
CPU. See Section 2 for more information.
Several repositories exist for DTrace scripts. The OpenSolaris DTrace com-
munity1 is a good starting point. The DTrace Toolkit is a collection of useful
scripts that maybe of aid in your troubleshooting.
1http://opensolaris.org/os/community/dtrace/
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Two other tools that are available are truss which can trace system calls
made by applications and apptrace which is used to trace function calls made
by an application.
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Appendix A
Packages
The following is a list of the software packages that are bundled with, or sup-
ported on, Solaris 10. Any package that is listed emphasized is fully supported
by Sun and Sun provides support the same as for Sun owned software. Oth-
erwise, Sun provides existing patches and escalates new bugs to the developer
community
Network Servers & Clients
Apache Apache2 bind
Mozilla ncftp ppp
Samba sendmail SER (SIP Proxy Server)
Tomcat wget wu-ftpd
xntpd Zebra
Commands
a2ps MySQL bzip2
patch footmatic print ppds texinfo
ghostscript traceroute ghostscript fonts
Webmin Gimp print drivers gzip
GNU patch utility GNU tar GNU grep
less ImageMagick texi2html
IPMItool mkisofs Open Printing API
rpm2cpio.pl System Management Agent
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Libraries
Glib GTK+ JPEG
Libexpat Libusb Libxslt
PNG Tcl/Tk TIFF
XML2 XPM zlib
Compilers & Tools
Binutils gcc Bison
gm4 Flex gmake
Scripting Languages
Perl Python
Security Tools
Secure Shell tcp wrappers
Shells
bash tcsh zsh
Applications
Networking
cups-1.1.20 ethereal 0.10.5 fetchmail 6.2.5
hpijs 1.6 lynx-2.8.4 mutt-1.4.2.1
nmap 3.5 nmh-1.0.4 Open LDAP 2.2.17
Open SLP 1.0.11 pine-4.61 procmail-3.22
rsync 2.6.3pre1 slm-0.9.6.2 snort-2.0.0
tcpdump-3.8.3
Publishing
espgs-7.07.1 graphviz 1.10 gro -1.16.1
xpdf 3.0
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Utilities
ao-2.4.6 amanda-2.4.4 cdrtools-2.01
cupsddk 1.0 di utils-2.8.1 enscript-1.6.1
expect 5.39 le-4.10 leutils-4.1
ndutils-4.1.20 Foomatic lters 3.0.2 Foomatic-ppds 3.0.1
gcal-3.01 gettext-0.10.35 gimp-print-4.2.6
gkrellm 2.1.19 gnuplot 3.7.3 ispell-3.2.06
lxrun 0.9.6.1 mpack-1.5 mpage-2.5.1
mpg123-0.59r mysql-jdbc-3.0.8 netpbm-10.3
plotutils-2.4.1 pnm2ppa-1.12 rpm-4.1
sane 1.0.12 screen 4.0.2 sgrep-1.92a
sh-utils-2.0a sharutils-4.2.1 sudo 1.6.8p5
TeTex 2.0.2 textutils-2.0 tnef 1.1.3
top-3.5.1 uudeview-0.5.20 vorbis-1.0
wine 20041104 xpp-1.1
Accessibility
brltty-3.3.1 emacspeak-18.0 emacspeak-ss-1.9.1
freetts-1.1.1 screenbrltty-4.02 unwindows-1.1.3
w3-4.0.47 yasr-0.6.4
Editors
bluesh 0.12 emacs 21.3 gawk-3.0.6
joe-3.1 sed-3.02 (GNU) vim-6.3
xemacs-21.4.15
Development
Tools
autoconf 2.59 automake 1.8.3 binutils-2.15
cvs 1.11.17 ddd 3.3.8 gdb 6.2.1
Languages
bison-1.35 gcc-2.95.3 gcc-3.4.2
libtool 1.5.2 m4-1.4 (GNU) MySQL python API 0.9.2
php-4.3.2 ruby-1.6.4 samp-1.0
tclX-8.2.0
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Libraries
aalib-1.2 berkley-db 1.85 berkley-db 4.2.52NC
curl-7.10.3
tk-1.1.3 fnlib-0.5
GD Graphics library 2.0.15 guile-1.3.4 imlib-1.9.15
libexpt-1.95.7 libmpeg-1.3.1 libpcap-0.8.3
libsane 1.0.14 linungif-4.1.0 ncurses-5.2
Ogglib-1.0 Perl regex lib 4.5 qt-3.1.1
Desktop
Environment
kde-3.1.1a KOce-1.2.1 XFce-3.8.16
System
Daemons
imap2002d (UW) proftpd 1.2.10rc1 squid 2.5.STABLE7
X
Applications
afterstep-1.8.8 fvwm2-2.4.3 WindowMaker-0.80.2
Window Managers
global-4.8 readline-4.2 make-3.80 (GNU)
slang-1.4.0 SDL-1.2.5 Xaw3d-1.5
asclock-1.0 xcpustate-2.5 ethereal-0.9.11
xdelta 1.1.3 gimp-1.2.1 xmcd 3.2.1
rxvt-2.7.10 xmms 1.2.10 stardic-1.3.1
xterm-196 (XFree86) vnc-3.3.7
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Appendix B
Quick Reference Guide
The information in this chapter can be used as a quick reference when moving
from Linux to Solaris. It will give information on the command changes and
application di erences.
Table B.1: Command Di erences
Linux Solaris
ps /usr/bin/ps requires command line argument
changes
/usr/ucb/ps has compatible command line argu-
ments but the output maybe di erent.
tcpdump use snoop
awk Use one of nawk, /usr/xpg4/bin/awk or gawk.
tar Use /usr jopt/sfw/bin/gtar
Table B.2: Conguration Files
Linux Solaris
/etc/fstab /etc/vfstab
/etc/exports /etc/dfs/dfstab
/etc/ntp.conf /etc/inet/ntp.conf
/etc/aliases /etc/mail/aliases
/etc/inetd.conf inetadm (solaris 10)
/etc/xinetd.conf inetadm (solaris 10)
Solaris 9 - convert to /etc/inetd.conf
/etc/printcap /etc/printers.conf
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Table B.3: Kernel Drivers
Linux Solaris
/etc/modules* /etc/system
/kernel/drv/*.conf
Table B.4: Kernel Conguration
Linux Solaris
sysctl /etc/system
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Index
/etc/system, 43
/opt/sfw/bin, 4
/platform, 3
/proc, 2, 3
/usr/bin, 3
/usr/sfw/bin, 4
/usr/ucb, 3
adb, 43, 44
adddrv, 46
apptrace, 66
awk, 19, 20
gawk, 20
GNU awk, 19
nawk, 20
System V awk, 19
XPG4 awk, 20
BART, 50
basename, 19
boot archive, 62
bzip, 60
cat, 20
chmod, 23
chown, 20
chroot jails, 11
coreadm, 63
CUPS, 38
devfsadm, 46
df, 21, 56
DTrace, 14, 43
dtrace, 14, 44
du, 22, 56
dump, 60
edquota, 40
eeprom, 47
ext3, 2
fdisk, 40
lesystem(5), 3
Flash Archives, 32
FMRI, 8
format, 40
fsck, 16
fssnap, 60
getfacl, 25
Global Zone, 11
GNU, 19
GNU tar, 25
groupadd, 27, 38
gzip, 60
halt, 37
inetadm, 9, 51
inetconv, 9
inetd, 9
init, 36, 37
insmod, 43
iostat, 57
JFS, 2
Jumpstart, 30
kstat, 54
Least Privileges, 50
legacy run, 8
Live Upgrade, 32
loadm, 40
lsmod, 43
metastat, 56
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minicom, 47
modinfo, 43
modload, 43, 46
modprobe, 43
modunload, 43, 46
mpstat, 54
ndd, 43, 44
netstat, 55
patchadd, 34
patchrm, 34
pkgadd, 34
pkgrm, 34
Predictive Self Healing, 18
prstat, 57
ps, 22
psrinfo, 54
quot, 40
quota, 40
RBAC, 50
reboot, 37
reiser, 2
Resource Management, 11
restore, 60
rmmod, 43
rpm, 34
Run Levels, 36
setfacl, 23
setserial, 47
seyon, 47
Shells
/bin/bash, 2
/bin/sh, 2
smc, 38
SMF, 8, 18
smgroup, 38
smpatch, 34
smuser, 38
Solaris Containers, 11
Solaris Security Toolkit, 50
ssh, 43
Standards
POSIX, 2
SVID, 2
XPG, 2
SunSolve, 34
svcadm, 8, 9, 51
svccfg, 9
svcs, 8, 9
sysctl, 43
tar, 25
telnet, 43
tip, 47
top, 57
truss, 66
UFS, 2
ufsdump, 60
ufsrestore, 60
up2date, 34
updatemanager, 34
useradd, 25, 38
Virtualization, 11
vmstat, 54
vold, 46
XFS, 2
ZFS, 2, 16, 41
zfs, 60
zip, 60
zoneadm, 12
zonecfg, 12
Zones, 11
Sparse, 12
Whole Root, 12
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