Preface

The Sun N1 System Manager Administration Guide helps system administrators to understand and administer the Sun N1^TM System Manager. This book provides detailed examples and procedures to explain how you can use the N1 System Manager to manage users and roles, to perform OS installations and updates, and to provision, discover, monitor, and manage servers.

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Note –

Most of the information in this book focuses on the command-line interface of the N1 System Manager. Instructions are provided when the browser interface can also be used for the same task. Click the Help button in the upper right corner of the browser interface to access the searchable online help system.

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Who Should Use This Book

This guide is intended for system administrators who are responsible for managing provisionable servers running the Sun N1 System Manager software. These system administrators are expected to have the following background:

• Knowledge of the Solaris^TM Operating System and Linux, and the network administration tools provided by each operating system

• Knowledge of network equipment and network devices from a variety of vendors such as Sun Microsystems and Cisco

• Knowledge of network device interconnections and cabling

Before You Read This Book

Read the following documents:

• Sun N1 System Manager 1.1 Introduction

• Sun N1 System Manager 1.1 Site Preparation Guide

• Sun N1 System Manager 1.1 Installation and Configuration Guide

How This Book Is Organized

Chapter 1, Managing the N1 System Manager on the Management Server describes the following:

• How to type commands in the N1 System Manager by using the command-line interface and the browser interface

• Session roles and the n1sh script file

• Security and how to add, remove, and manage users and roles

• Performance guidelines and how to increase the management server performance

• How to backup and recover database and configuration files

Chapter 2, Discovering, Grouping, and Replacing Servers in the Sun N1 System Manager describes the discovery process, how to add managed servers to groups, and how to replace failed servers.

Chapter 3, Provisioning Operating Systems, OS Updates, and Firmware Updates provides conceptual and procedural information about how to manage OS installations, OS updates, and firmware updates.

Chapter 4, Managing Servers and Server Groups contains procedures on how to refresh, replace, rename, reboot, and remove managed servers and groups.

Chapter 5, Monitoring Your Servers explains how to monitor servers and groups, and how to set and manage polling intervals and thresholds. This chapter also explains how to view and manage jobs and event logs, and how to create notifications.

Chapter 6, Troubleshooting describes possible troubleshooting scenarios and solutions for threshold breaches, OS distribution issues, OS deployment failures, and OS update issues.

Related Books

The following books are useful for installing and using the N1 System Manager.

• Sun N1 System Manager 1.1 Introduction

• Sun N1 System Manager 1.1 Site Preparation Guide

• Sun N1 System Manager 1.1 Installation and Configuration Guide

• Sun N1 System Manager 1.1 Command Line Reference Manual

• Sun N1 System Manager 1.1 Release Notes

The monitoring agent that is deployed by the Sun N1 System Manager software is based on the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agent used by the Sun^TM Management Center software. See the Sun Management Center 3.5 Service Availability Manager User's Guide for more information about this SNMP agent.

Documentation, Support, and Training

Sun Function	URL	Description
Documentation	http://www.sun.com/documentation/	Download PDF and HTML documents, and order printed documents
Support and Training	http://www.sun.com/supportraining/	Obtain technical support, download patches, and learn about Sun courses

Typographic Conventions

The following table describes the typographic changes that are used in this book.

Table P–1 Typographic Conventions

Typeface or Symbol	Meaning	Example
AaBbCc123	The names of commands, files, and directories, and onscreen computer output	Edit your .login file. Use ls -a to list all files. machine_name% you have mail.
AaBbCc123	What you type, contrasted with onscreen computer output	machine_name% su Password:
aabbcc123	Placeholder: replace with a real name or value	The command to remove a file is rm filename.
AaBbCc123	Book titles, new terms, and terms to be emphasized	Read Chapter 6 in the User's Guide. Perform a patch analysis. Do not save the file. [Note that some emphasized items appear bold online.]

Shell Prompts in Command Examples

The following table shows the default system prompt and superuser prompt for the C shell, Bourne shell, and Korn shell.

Table P–2 Shell Prompts

Shell	Prompt
C shell prompt	machine_name%
C shell superuser prompt	machine_name#
Bourne shell and Korn shell prompt	$
Bourne shell and Korn shell superuser prompt	#

In this book, unless otherwise specified, the term command line is used to describe the n1sh shell, which uses the N1–ok> prompt. The n1sh shell is defined as any of the following:

• The shell available from the Command Line pane of the browser interface

• The shell available after typing n1sh in a terminal console window on the management server

You can also use N1 System Manager commands from the standard command line. Precede N1 System Manager commands by the n1sh command in the standard command line in a UNIX shell.