Network Management and System Administration

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.

UFS Logging

UFS logging is the process of storing transactions (changes that make up a complete UFS operation) in a log before the transactions are applied to the UFS file system. Once a transaction is stored, the transaction can be applied to the file system later.

UFS logging provides two advantages. It prevents file systems from becoming inconsistent, therefore eliminating the need to run fsck(1M). And, because fsck can be bypassed, UFS logging reduces the time required to reboot a system if it crashes, or after an unclean halt.

UFS logging is not enabled by default. To enable UFS logging, you must specify the -o logging option with the mount(1M) command when mounting the file system. Also, the fsdb(1M) command has been updated with new debugging commands for UFS logging.

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

UFS Mount Option to Ignore Access Time Updates

To ignore access time updates on files, you can specify the -o noatime option when mounting a UFS file system. This option reduces disk activity on file systems where access times are unimportant (for example, a Usenet news spool). See the mount_ufs(1M) man page for more details.

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is an open-standard, platform-independent, access protocol based on the X.500 informational model. It is designed to run over TCP/IP and uses simple string encodings. LDAP applications are client-server applications and the client library included in this release enables developers to write LDAP applications and users to run LDAP enabled applications.

SPARC: Dynamic Reconfiguration for Hot-Pluggable System Boards

Dynamic reconfiguration (DR) allows the service provider to add, or remove and replace, hot-pluggable system boards in a running system, eliminating the time lost in rebooting. Also, if a replacement board is not immediately available, the system administrator can use DR to shut down a failing board while allowing the server to continue operations. Only certain SPARC servers support this version of DR.

See your hardware manufacturer's documentation for information about whether DR supports your server.

New Commands, pgrep and pkill, to Manage Processes

The Solaris 7 release provides the pgrep and pkill commands, which replace the combination of the ps, grep, egrep, awk, and kill commands that were used to manage processes in previous Solaris releases. The pgrep command looks at the active processes on the system and displays the process IDs of the processes whose attributes match the specified criteria on the command line. The pkill command works the same way as the pgrep command except that each matching process ID is signaled by kill(2) instead of having the process ID displayed.

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

sendmail

The sendmail 8.9 includes hooks that permit restriction of spam (unsolicited, bulk email); virtual hosting, which allows email to be received using different domain names; and an improved configuration hierarchy that makes building your own sendmail configuration file much easier.

For more information, see Mail Administration Guide.

Traceroute Utility

Solaris 7 software bundles the popular traceroute utility. The traceroute utility is used to trace the route an IP packet follows to an Internet host. Traceroute uses the IP protocol ttl (time to live) field and attempts to elicit an ICMP TIME_EXCEEDED response from each gateway along the path, and PORT_UNREACHABLE (or ECHO_REPLY) from the destination host. The traceroute utility starts sending probes with a ttl of 1, and increases by one until it gets to the intended host or has passed through a maximum number of intermediate hosts.

The traceroute utility is especially useful for determining routing configuration problems and routing path failures. If a particular host is unreachable, the traceroute utility can be used to see what path the packet follows to the intended host and where possible failures occur. The traceroute utility also displays the round-trip time for each gateway along the path to the target host. This information can be useful for analyzing where traffic is slow between the two hosts.

For more information, see TCP/IP and Data Communications Administration Guide.

System Crash Dump Utility

The Solaris 7 system crash dump features are the following:

• The dumpadm command enables system administrators to configure crash dumps of the operating system. The dumpadm configuration parameters include the dump content, dump device, and the directory to which core files are written. This command can set and change parameters as well as verify the validity of a crash dump configuration.

• The savecore command is now enabled by default.

• Dump data is now stored in compressed format on the dump device. Kernel crash dump images can be as big as 4 Gbytes or more. Compressing the data means faster dumping and less disk space needed for the dump device.

• Saving core files is run in the background when a dedicated dump device--not the primary swap area--is part of the dump configuration. A booting system doesn't have to wait for the savecore command to complete before going to the next step. On large memory systems, the system can be available before savecore completes.

See System Administration Guide, Volume II for more information about system crash dump features.