Solaris 8: The Complete Reference

A solid document on the Solaris operating system, Solaris 8: The Complete Reference shows you what you need to understand if you want to make a living as administrator of a modern Sun workstation. Of course, this book is not absolutely complete--no technical book about a subject as large as Solaris 8 could hope to be--but it should be more than adequate for most readers' purposes. Whether you have experience with another enterprise operating system and have recently been charged with figuring out Solaris, or you're a long-time Solaris jock and need a handy reference to guide you through procedures that you don't follow every day, this book has your number.

The book approaches each Solaris capability from a variety of angles. Most often, it takes a few pages to explain the "Solaris way" of thinking about a problem, contrasting it with alternate approaches (such as those that might be used in Linux or Windows NT) where that might be appropriate. Straight how-to material usually follows in sections that have titles like, "Testing Reachability"; those sections further break down into modules that have to do with special cases, such as troubleshooting situations. Text and listings of input and output predominate--an effective format for an operating system that's driven largely by console activity. --David Wall

Topics covered: The Solaris operating system generally, with coverage of the features that are new in release 8. A large section covers installation, user and software administration, file-system management and backup planning, and process management. Networking comes next--with sections on routing, the DNS, and DHCP. Samba and the Network File System (NFS), plus explicit instructions on integrating Solaris with Windows NT 4.0.