Solaris 10: tips and tricks for system administration

At last, there's a new build of Solaris Express out, and it sports along with other features a newboot - the next x86 boot architecture. This means that my recent entry on Installing Solaris with PXE/DHCP might actually be useful for someone now ;)

For those of you really interested: Dan Price has once again covered all the new features which came in this Solaris Express build.

As always, you can download this Solaris Express build from this location.

Today I was going to spend some time writing up an example of adding a service to Solaris 10 and explain working with manifest by replacing the standard SSH-server which comes with Solaris 10 FCS with the latest build of OpenSSH - 4.1p1. But after I'd quickly looked into the /var/svc/manifest/network/ssh.xml file, I realised that I wouldn't write a really good example today. Things turned out to be much easier than I expected. To replace an SSH server, you simply have to change paths to ssh-keygen and sshd files in /lib/svc/method/sshd. That's the file used by the manifest ssh.xml.

pS: of course, you're going to have to download and compile OpenSSH before doing anything else.

Incredible! It hasn't even been a full week since opening the sources of OpenSolaris, and we already have the first OpenSolaris-based distribution - SchilliX. Yes, it does seem like Solaris fans have really been anticipating OpenSolaris ;)

The creator of this project is Joerg Schilling - he's an author of a well-known cdrecord and a leader of the BerliOS project.

You can download a SchilliX LiveCD from this page.

I've just found out from the most recent entry in the blog of Sean McGrath that a public version of FileBench has been finally made available yesterday.

FileBench is a universal benchmark allowing you to emulate various models of stressing a filesystem. It is also a framework which deals with personalities - special configuration files - which provide emulation of rather complex applications from the point of their filesystem interaction. There are few such personalities - they emulate mail and web-server behaviour, oltp database, etc.

Nicky Veitch had an entry on FileBench for quite some time now, and if you need more info - there is a separate section on FileBench on the SolarisInternals website, right here.

Sources for FileBench 1.60 can be found on theFileBench project page at SourceForge.