Features for the System Administrator

For system administrators, the Solaris operating environment offers a variety of new tools to simplify the administration of a distributed computing environment. These include:

• Device information. Administrators can use these optional utilities to obtain information about installed devices including device names, attributes, and accessibility. Administration can be simplified by creating device allocation pools, a feature not previously found in UNIX systems.

• File system administration. These utilities enable administrators to create, copy, mount, debug, repair, and unmount file systems; create and remove hard file links and named pipes; and manage volumes.

• Interprocess communication. Two interprocess communication utilities create, remove, and report on the status of the system's interprocess communication facilities (message queues, semaphores, and shared memory IDs). They provide information helpful in tuning the system.

• Process management. The process management utilities help you control system scheduling. Using these utilities, administrators can generate reports on performance, logins, disk access locations, and seek distances to better tune system performance. In addition, you can change the system run level, kill active processes, time the execution of commands, and change the default scheduling priorities of kernel, timesharing, and real-time processes.

• System accounting. The accounting utilities enable system administrators to track system usage by CPU, user, and process for better resource allocation.

• System information. These utilities report system memory and system configuration. The system administrator can use the utilities to change the names of the systems and the network node.

• User and group management. With these utilities, a system administrator can create and delete entries in group and password databases, specify default home directories and environments, maintain user and system logins, and assign group and user IDs. The utilities support both primary and supplementary user groups.

• Admintool. Admintool, which runs under the OpenWindows environment, provides system management facilities to help add hosts, manage the network, and perform many other routine tasks on local systems.

• Auto configuration. The Solaris operating environment has a dynamic kernel, which means that it loads drivers and other modules into memory when the devices are accessed. You no longer need to rebuild the kernel after installation, nor must you add or remove drivers.

• Network Information Services Plus (NIS+). An upward-compatible version of the NIS name service with simpler hierarchical administration, improved security, and faster updates.

• Installation. The Solaris operating environment has an install GUI to ease installation or upgrades. Automatic installations and upgrades are also possible over the network.

• Security. The automated security enhancement tool (ASET) is a utility that improves security by allowing system administrators to check system file settings including permissions, ownership, and file contents. ASET warns users about potential security problems and, where appropriate, sets the system file permissions autonomically according to the specified security level.