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5 August 2013

Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration The Complete Reference

by Alpha01

As its title implies, I originally purchased this book as a reference to the Solaris 11 operating system. Prior to reading this book I had very little knowledge of Solaris, sure I’ve dabbed with Solaris 10 before, but nothing up to a point were I would seriously consider using it. I was initially attracted to this book because of the lack of Solaris 11 books and the fact that it was specifically designed for Linux administrators. Thus said, reading the initial five chapters of this book felt like a complete waste. About a third of the book was dedicated to installating Solaris and its graphical user interface, it wasn’t until the sixth chapter and 144 pages later, the authors decided to finally writing about Solaris specific things a sysadmin cares about. On the other hand the authors did a really good explaining in full detail Solaris 11 features, most noticeably ZFS, Service Management Facility, Image Packing System, and Zones.

Since the book is designed for Linux administrations coming in the world of Solaris, the authors opted to dedicate chapters about configuring and setting up applications like BIND/ISC DHCP, Apache, Sendmail, ProFTPD, and Samba on Solaris, which I didn’t like because it felt like the book was falling out of scope at times. Another importing thing that I didn’t like about this book is that the authors hardly ever mentioned ipadm and dladm, which I think are vital for new Solaris systems administrators to know. Also, very little was mentioned about ipf, the default firewall in Solaris 11. Aside from the ZFS, SMF, IPS, and Zones content, I was very disappointing with this book.

Rating: 2/5

Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration The Complete Reference

Tags: [ solaris ]