[Solaris10] First message, first workshop

[Solaris10 at nieuwenj.com]

Hello everyone !


I am very happy to present you the very first message
of the Solaris 10 mailing list. It was a vague idea at
the beginning but Solaris 10 seems to interest so many
people... Thanks for suggestion/comments/...

I hope I will meet some of you during one of our next
workshops !

Jean-Christophe, nieuwenj at nieuwenj.com
°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

=====================================
Here is the first Table of contents: 
=====================================
0. Solaris 10 is released !
1. First  "Solaris 10 workshop"  :  SMF !
2. Solaris 10 Installation topics : new docs and new
patching tool
3. Authentication topics : new lab
4. SMF : new lab
5. DTrace : news
6. Solaris 10 security :  B.A.R.T. lab
7. Solaris 10 source code available
8. Yet another Solaris 10 website
=====================================


0. Solaris 10 is released !
---------------------------

and of course, it is freely downloadable, for Sparc
and x86 ( Intel and AMD ).
Relevant URL : http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/


1. First  "Solaris 10 workshop"  :  SMF !
-----------------------------------------

At last I have been able to put together the content
for the first workshop.  My full description can be
found here :
Relevant URL :
http://www.nieuwenj.com/workshops/SMF_Workshop.html

Very soon, it will be possible to subscribe using a
Sun link. Check it out. ( It will also be posted on my
website ).

Goal of the workshop :
Everything you need to know to be up to speed with the
brand new way choosen by Sun to start, stop, configure
and secure long running daemons, called "services" in
Solaris 10, and the way to port non-Sun applications
to the SMF infrastructure. These are real "good to
know" before doing any upgrade!

Am happy with this headline. Sounds good ;-!


2. Solaris 10 Installation topics : new docs
--------------------------------------------

    * Wanboot :  now works like a charm, if you can
live with a Flash archive smaller than 2 Gigabytes. 
Sun was nice enough to write a document especially for
all people who experienced the nice "port 80
'peername' does not match 'host' "  error message
during classroom experiments. See Infodoc 79918 for
the full information. Note that a compressed flash
archive ( -c option of flarcreate(1M) ) of a Solaris
10 machine configured with SUNWCAll  has got an
approximate size of 1.7GB...
Relevant URL :
http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-25-79918-1&searchclause=solaris%2010

    * Wanboot : Infodoc 77823 describes the complete
procedure.
Relevant URL :
http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-9-77823-1&searchclause=wanboot

    * DVD Installation : if you are lazy to check for
yourself how the installation from a DVD looks like,
check out Infodoc 80355 , it will show you all the
screens... Note that on our Sun Fire 4800, booting
using an OBP alias didn't work while booting using the
device path did work.
Relevant URL :
http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-9-80355-1&searchclause=solaris%2010

    * Sun Update Connection 1.0 : or the return of the
next generation patching tool from Sun. Available only
for S10, check out Infodoc 79694.
Relevant URL :
http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-9-79694-1&searchclause=solaris%20%22solaris%5BTM%5D%2010%22


3. Authentication topics : new lab
----------------------------------

A (not so) new exercise has been written to illustrate
two important topics :

    * you can now lock a certain account after a
number of failed login attempts
    * how to give some default privileges to users.
Maybe I said to some of you that it was impossible. If
so then, well, I was wrong ! Be careful with this
feature !!!

Relevant URL :
http://www.nieuwenj.com/labs/Extra_priv_Rbac.txt


4. SMF : new lab
----------------

Another (not so) new exercise has been written to
illustrate the following :

    * There seems to be a new pseudo filesystem
mounted at boot time on /system/contracts. What is it
all about ?
    * Can I use the contract subsystem to watch for
any application and restart it if needed ?  ( Short
reply : yes ! )

Relevant URL :
http://www.nieuwenj.com/labs/Extra_Contracts.txt

5. DTrace : news
----------------

If you REALLY want to do it, then you can download
Dtrace source code.  See topic number 7 !
Relevant URL :
http://opensolaris.org/download/index.html

6. Solaris 10 security :  B.A.R.T. lab
--------------------------------------

A filesystem audit tool like Tripwire has always been
missing in Solaris. Solaris 10 comes up with a Basic
Audit & Reporting Tool  called ... BART. If you want
to know what it can do and what it won't do for you, I
invite you to have a look at this paper / lab.

Relevant URL :
http://www.nieuwenj.com/labs/Extra_BART.txt
Relevant URL :
http://www.nieuwenj.com/labs/Extra_BART_solution.txt

7. Solaris 10 source code available
-----------------------------------

You should of course bookmark http://opensolaris.org

Just type opensolaris in Google if you want to read
billions of opinions about the release of Solaris
source code...

8. Yet another Solaris 10 website
---------------------------------

When thinking about how to make my extra docs
available to everyone, I first thought to attach it to
this mail. But that is a silly way of distributing
info of course. Then, encouraged by some of you, I
thought that it could be a good idea to make
everything available in a website. So there it is,
veeeeeery drafty but web designing is a difficult job
! What you will find soon on http://www.nieuwenj.com 
includes :

    * A bookmark of many interesting websites where
good info about Solaris 10 can be found
    * A library of public documents that will tell you
all about  Zones, ZFS, ...
    * A poll to help me choose the topic of the next
workshops
    * A Zones F.A.Q.
    *  ???

Actually, if you have got an idea or some wishes, let
me know.

There it is, I hope that you found some of this
document useful. Feel free to forward it to whoever
could be interested.

Jean-Christophe

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Disclaimer : this newsletter is a personal initiative.
Neither Sun Micro nor Accenture BPM are involved.
Don't use the labs on production machines !
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