(OT) Retraining on Solaris

inman has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have used Windows NT/2K for a number of years and have been happily using Perl in that environment for at least a couple of years. I have made one or two forays into the world of UNIX so that I know how to get about but that's about it. I have booked a training course that is aimed at the system administrator since it covered tasks beyond the basics covered in the beginners course. I have become reasonably proficient in day-to-day tasks through my use of UNIX to run some of the Perl scripts ported from Win32. My objective at the end of the course is to have the skills to administer a server that I can use to develop and run my Perl apps.

I am looking for a book recommendation (or online resource) so that I can prepare for the course by practising key tasks. I will probably end up buying the Solaris Operating Environment System Administrator's Guide as a reference when I am finished with the course unless there are better recommendations.

Thanks in advance!

Comment on (OT) Retraining on Solaris

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Re: (OT) Retraining on Solaris by nimdokk (Vicar) on May 25, 2004 at 12:30 UTC
The book you mention is a good one, I've got a copy of it at home myself. I would also recommend the Sun courses: UNIX Essentials Featuring the Solaris 9 Operating System (SA-119) Intermediate System Administration for the Solaris 9 Operating System (SA-239) You can get info on them from the http://suned.sun.com site. Also, you can download a home use copy of Solaris 9 to install on x86 (or Sparc if you have one at home).	[reply]
Re: Retraining on Solaris by Abigail-II (Bishop) on May 25, 2004 at 12:59 UTC
I've given the predecessors of the courses (SA-118, SA-238 for Solaris 8) and also the System Administration II several times. I'm not at all trilled about the course materials (for instance, when it introduces 'find' in the beginners course (on day 2, IIRC) it immediately discusses almost all its options as well). I've once given a Solaris course using materials from HP education (and hence the material was about HP-UX), and I vastly prefer that material over the material supplied by SUN education - even for a Solaris course. Unfortunally, I don't have an answer what a good book for Solaris is. Except for the course materials, I don't know any. I love Solaris, did lots of adminning on it, but I just grew into it. Abigail	[reply]
Re: Re: Retraining on Solaris by nimdokk (Vicar) on May 25, 2004 at 13:19 UTC
Hmm, maybe it was because when I took the course, I had been using Unix for quite a while (variety of flavours) and been using Solaris as well for a while as well.	[reply]
Re: (Off topic) Retraining on Solaris by Abigail-II (Bishop) on May 25, 2004 at 13:36 UTC
Re: Re: (Off topic) Retraining on Solaris by nimdokk (Vicar) on May 25, 2004 at 13:41 UTC
Some notes below your chosen depth have not been shown here
Re: (OT) Retraining on Solaris by McMahon (Chaplain) on May 25, 2004 at 14:26 UTC
I'm fairly new to Windows development, but had a couple of years on Solaris before that. When I got my Windows gig, one of the first things I did was find a couple of old machines and put FreeBSD on them, because I knew I would want servers and network tools either not available on Windows or very expensive. I've learned more about Unix by hacking FreeBSD than I ever learned in a Solaris production shop. Solaris is of course much slicker, but FreeBSD is a coherent whole (unlike GNU/Linux), and the documentation available is remarkably good. To get the basics of Unix server administration under your fingers, you could do a lot worse than setting up your favorite servers on FreeBSD.	[reply]