(OT) Solaris

[Aaron Spiegel]

I don't think basic system administration of Solaris 8/9 shouldn't be
too much of a learning curve.  Most differences can be handled by the
rosetta stone (http://bhami.com/rosetta.html).

Solaris 10 has a lot more differences, but the only one you would
*need* to learn about is the Solaris svcs stuff, which has taken over
Solaris init scripts (Think DJB's daemon tools for everything).

There are big differences in how the Solaris kernel runs that you
should know about for performance monitoring, the most notable being
in the way it handles memory.  Solaris doesn't free up any more than 3
or 5% of memory, so the only reliable way to monitor your memory usage
is to watch for scanrates.  On Solaris 8+, if the system scans then
the system has run out of memory-- otherwise, it hasn't (there are
other rules for S. 7 and lower)

That being said there are a lot of additional features in Solaris that
you may want to use, like:
* Role based access control (introduced in S. 9)
* Resource Manager (limiting a process's CPU usage-- introduced in S. 9)
* Solaris Zones (process isolation + chroot to emulate of multiple
OS's-- introduced S.10)
* DTrace (process instrumentation-- introduced S.10)

These require some study to implement, but you can run a systems
without knowing that they exist.

HTH
Aaron