Stefan Arentz

I’ve decided to spend my time on more useful things than learning historic programming languages like Lisp. (Although that was a lot of fun and it definitely changed my thinking and coding style in a positive way!)

My goal for the coming months is to master Open Solaris. What I want to learn is a good mix of system administration and application development, debugging and performance tuning tricks.

I actually started using Solaris 2.x many years ago. That was the first release that came after SunOS 4.1.4. The last BSD-like OS that came out of Sun before they made the switch to SysV.

We ran Solaris on a Axil 320 Sparc clone, on which we actually hosted a complete ISP setup. From email to web to usenet. Those where the days. Soon however when FreeBSD and Linux became more popular halfway the 90s, we stopped using Solaris and I haven’t really looked back at it.

But now in 2008, Solaris is back in a big way. Solaris 10 is a free download and runs on Intel or AMD hardware and Open Solaris is even completely open source. Very nice change of plans and a lot of incentive to take a look at it.

To get started I found two promising books on Safari, my digital bookshelf.

The first, Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris , is more oriented towards software developers and system administrators who are interested in analyzing, debugging and optimizing Solaris and the software running on it.

The second, Solaris 10 System Administration Exam Prep, is a pretty in-depth book about anything related to system administration. From disks to network interfaces, from user accounts to Zones.

I don’t have a real and dedicated Solaris box running yet. Instead I now simply run the latest Solaris Express Developer Edition on my MacBook Pro under VMWare Fusion. Works great and is much easier to restore when you accidentally destroy it.

More later. Under the Solaris category.