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What's New in the Solaris 8 Operating Environment

Networking

The Solaris operating environment provides a stable and reliable networking environment. New network management and system administration features in this release expand tools for managing this environment.

SPARC: InterDomain Networks

InterDomain Networks (IDNs) enable the user to set up high-speed network connections between dynamic system domains without special hardware. Only certain SPARC servers support IDN. See your hardware manufacturer's documentation for information about whether your server supports IDNs.

For more information, see the Sun Enterprise 10000 InterDomain Networks User Guide.

This feature was first available in the Solaris 7 11/99 release.

IPsec for IPv4

The IP Security Architecture (IPsec) provides protection for IP datagrams. The protection can include confidentiality, strong integrity of the data, partial sequence integrity (replay protection), and data authentication. IPsec is the authentication and encryption mechanism that affects the IP layer and can be effective with or without the knowledge of applications.

For more information, see the System Administration Guide, Volume 3.

IPv6 NFS/RPC Compliant

This feature adds IPv6 support to NFS and RPC in a seamless manner. There are no changes to existing commands related to NFS. Most RPC applications will also run over IPv6 without any change. Some advanced RPC applications with transport knowledge might require updates.

For more information, see the System Administration Guide, Volume 3.

LLC2 Protocol

The Class II logical link control driver (LLC2) interfaces network software (NetBIOS, SNA, OSI) running under the Solaris operating environment to a physical LAN network controlled by one of the supported communications adapters. The LLC2 driver, which appears as a driver to the network software, resides in the kernel and is accessed by standard UNIX STREAMS functions.

This version of the LLC2 driver includes support for both connectionless and connection-oriented logical link control class II LLC2 operations for Ethernet, Token Ring, and FDDI adapters when accessed through the appropriate Solaris MAC layer driver. The Data Link Provider Interface (DLPI) to the LLC2 driver enables multiple and different protocol stacks, (including NetBIOS and SNA), to operate simultaneously over one or more local area networks.

For more information on LLC2, see the System Administration Guide, Volume 3. For more information on DLPI, see the STREAMS Programming Guide and the man page dlpi(7P).

This feature was first available in the Solaris 7 8/99 release.

NIS/NIS+ Over IPv6 Transports

Users can store IPv6 addresses in the NIS, NIS+, and DNS naming services, and also use NIS and NIS+ over IPv6 RPC transports to retrieve any NIS or NIS+ data. Two new maps have been added for NIS: ipnodes.byname and ipnodes.byaddr. These maps can contain both IPv4 and IPv6 information. A new table, ipnodes.org_dir, has been added for NIS+, and it can also contain both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. While use of the new ipnodes(4) database is preferred for both IPv4 and IPv6, the hosts(4) database continues to be supported for IPv4 addresses.

For more information, see the System Administration Guide, Volume 3.

sendmail 8.9.3

This version includes a new option, MaxHeadersLength, that limits the length of the sum of all header lines in any given message, which can prevent a denial-of-service attack. Also included is a new version of mail.local that implements the Local Mail Transfer Protocol, RFC 2033. This change allows for re-queuing of mail to the recipients that did not receive a message, rather than re-sending the message to all of the recipients if an error occurs. A new file called /etc/default/sendmail can be used to store options to start sendmail, so that the options are not touched during an upgrade. In addition, a new utility called smrsh increases security by reducing the number of commands that can be run using the |program syntax of sendmail.

For more information, see the System Administration Guide, Volume 3.

Service Location Protocol

The Service Location Protocol (SLP) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) protocol for discovering shared resources (such as printers, file servers, netcams, and so on) in an enterprise network. The Solaris 8 operating environment contains a full implementation of SLP that includes APIs that enable developers to write SLP-enabled applications, and provides system administrators a framework for ease of network extensibility.

For more information, see the Service Location Protocol Administration Guide.

Solaris STREAMS Framework Enhancements

The STREAMS framework enhancements in the Solaris 8 operating environment provide more deterministic response times for real-time processes by ensuring that STREAMS processing uses a priority that does not conflict with the user process priority.

The Solaris 8 operating environment also enforces conformance to the Solaris operating environment DDI specified interfaces for the following Solaris STREAMS support functions:

Conformance to the Solaris operating environment DDI specified interfaces has been implemented by redirecting the functions listed above to the ddi.h implementations of these same functions in all cases of usage.

Caution - Caution -

This enforced conformance introduces a risk of system failure in DDI non-compliant drivers and modules that incorrectly use the functions listed above. For DDI non-compliant drivers and modules, a version update of the non-compliant driver/module is required but no code changes are necessary.

For more detailed specifications of the functions listed above, see the STREAMS Programming Guide.

Network Time Protocol (NTP)

NTP is upgraded from 3.4y to 3-5.93e and includes the following new features:

For more information, see System Administration Guide, Volume 2.