What's New in the Solaris 9 4/04 Operating Environment

System Administration Tools

The Solaris 9 release includes the following system administration enhancements.

Solaris Volume Manager

Solaris Volume Manager provides storage management tools. These tools enable you to create and manage RAID-0, RAID-1, and RAID-5 volumes, as well as transactional (logging) devices and soft partitions. Solaris Volume Manager provides all of the capabilities of Solstice DiskSuite^TM. Solaris Volume Manager adds the following:

Soft partitions – Allow numerous partitions on a single drive, thus breaking the 8-slice barrier.
Device ID support – Preserves the configuration of the Solaris Volume Manager. When you move or rearrange disks, the configuration is still preserved.
Active monitoring of disks – Detects silent failures.
Solaris Management Console based interface – Enables you to manage the enhanced storage devices through the same management interface that is used for other Solaris management tasks.
The WBEM application programming interface (API) for Solaris Volume Manager – Enables standards-based management of Solaris Volume Manager from any compliant tool.

The Solaris 9 release seamlessly supports the upgrade of existing systems that run Solstice DiskSuite (SDS) to the Solaris Volume Manager. This upgrade does not disturb or change the configuration. Upgrades of mirrored root file systems are fully and automatically supported.

For more information, see the Solaris Volume Manager Administration Guide.

Unified `diff` Format

The diff and sccs-sccsdiff commands have been updated to include support for the GNU-style unified diff format. In this format, context lines are only printed once in the listing of differences.

For information on these commands, see the diff(1) and sccs-sccsdiff(1) man pages.

Generic Log Rotation Facility

A generic log rotation facility is available in the Solaris 9 release. System administrators can use this facility to maintain and rotate system and application log files. For further information, see the logadm(1M) and logadm.conf(4) man pages.

Solaris Management Console

Solaris Management Console 2.1 is a GUI-based “umbrella application” that serves as the starting point for a variety of management tools. The console comes complete with a default toolbox that contains the following tools:

System Information – Display read-only data about the host, hardware, and software.
Log Viewer – View application and command-line messages. Manage log files.
Processes – View, suspend, resume, and delete processes.
Performance – Track the usage and consumption of system resources.
Users – Set up and maintain user accounts, user templates, groups, mailing lists, administrative roles, and rights. Grant or deny rights to users and to administrative roles. These rights control access to applications and tasks.
Projects – Constrain how resources are allocated, by processes and by tasks that run in the current project.
Computers and Networks – View and manage computers, networks, and subnetworks.
Patches – Manage patches on systems that run the Solaris operating environment.
Scheduled Jobs – Schedule, start, and manage jobs.
Mounts and Shares – View and manage mounts, shares, and usage information.
Disks – Create and view disk partitions.
Enhanced Storage – Create and manage RAID–0, RAID–1, RAID–5, soft partitions, and transactional volumes. RAID–0 volumes include concatenation volumes and stripe volumes. RAID–1 volumes are mirror volumes. The enhanced storage enables the assembly of flexible storage configurations that are resistant to data loss or downtime.
Serial Ports – Configure and manage existing serial ports.

You can add or delete tools from the default toolbox. You can create a new toolbox to manage a different set of tools by using the console Toolbox Editor.

Diskless clients can also be managed, but only through a command-line interface.

For further information, see the “Solaris Management Console (Overview)” in System Administration Guide: Basic Administration.

Patch Manager

Patch Manager manages patches that are created for the Solaris 9 operating environment and compatible releases. You can display installed patches and their properties. You can add patches to one or more systems concurrently. You can remove patches, analyze a system's patch requirements, and download patches from the SunSolve Online service.

The new smpatch command installs patches on a single machine or multiple machines, analyzes patch requirements, and downloads required patches.

See the smpatch(1M) man page for further information.

Solaris WBEM Services 2.5

Solaris WBEM Services 2.5 is Sun Microsystems' implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM). WBEM is a set of management and Internet-related technologies. These technologies are intended to unify the management of enterprise compute environments. Solaris WBEM Services was updated to version 2.5 in the Solaris 9 release.

Further information is provided in Web-Based Enterprise Management Tools.

CIM Object Manager Now Listens to HTTP Port 5988

The CIM Object Manager listens for remote method invocation (RMI) connections on RMI port 5987. And, the Object Manager now listens for XML and HTTP connections on HTTP port 5988. In the Solaris 8 release and Solaris 8 update releases, the CIM Object Manager listened for XML and HTTP connections on default HTTP port 80.

For further information, see the new Solaris WBEM Developer's Guide, which has replaced the Solaris WBEM Services Administration Guide and the Solaris WBEM SDK Developer's Guide.

SNMP Adapter for WBEM

The SNMP Adapter for WBEM is intended for use by system administrators. This adapter enables Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) management applications to access the system management information that is provided by Solaris WBEM Services.

The SNMP Adapter for WBEM is used with the Solstice^TM Enterprise Agent (SEA) Master Agent. The adapter maps SNMP requests into equivalent WBEM Common Information Model (CIM) properties or instances.

The SNMP Adapter for WBEM also remaps the response from the CIM Object Manager into an SNMP response, which is returned to the management application.

A mapping file contains the corresponding object identifier (OID), class name, property name, and Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN.1) type for each object.

For further information on WBEM, see the new Solaris WBEM Developer's Guide, which has replaced the Solaris WBEM Services Administration Guide and the Solaris WBEM SKD Developer's GuideSolaris WBEM Services Administration Guide.

Solaris Product Registry 3.0

The Solaris Product Registry 3.0 includes the following new features:

The ability to uninstall individual system packages.
All of the Solaris system products that you installed in their localized version appear in the “System Software Localizations” folder.
The registry is compatible with more installation wizards.

For further information, see the System Administration Guide: Basic Administration.

Modify Software Groups in Solaris Web Start Program

The Solaris Web Start program was updated to enable you to modify the selected Solaris Software Group. You can add or remove software packages.