Hello all,

I need some advice/pointers from all the solaris people out there.

I had a phone interview (and this Tues. a face to face interview) with a guy looking for a Jr. Unix Administrator. He was impressed with my knowlage of Unix commands (he quized me), and knowladge of networking. Although I got NONE of the Solaris specific questions right...I did get ALL of the unix commands right. So he wants to meet with me to disscuss this opportunity with me.

I am a Linux guy, and I mostly worked with Red Hat Based Distros (Fedora and CentOS)

Is there much difference I need to know? Any pointers or advice? Thanks

-Custangro

The difference is mainly in administration and perhaps in scale. A lot of people using Solaris/HP-UX/AIX are running much larger RISC based servers and will often have concepts used that one might not use in Linux even if it is available. For example Veritas Volume Manager (VxFS) is available on Solaris and HP-UX. It is similar in concept to LVM on Linux (and also HP-UX) but the details are quite different. Disk storage on large systems tends to be on external hardware RAID devices rather than internal to the system as it is on a lot of Linux desktops.

The key here is "Jr". It sounds as if he is looking for someone who already knows the basics (ls, df, vi, etc...) that he can train for the differences.

I've successfully moved from AT&T UNIX --> SCO UNIX --> HP-UX --> Solaris --> Linux and a fair number of other flavors in between. Knowing the basics gets you pretty far along although I'll have to say going from small systems to HP-UX was a bit of a learning curve for me.

You might want to have a look at Rosetta Stone as it gives some nice information about differences between various Unix variants and Linux .

http://bhami.com/rosetta.html

The new ZFS in solaris is pretty much the only big difference is see when comparing an average linux distro with solaris. ZFS isn’t just another filesystem, but it’s a completely different way of doing filesystems. You pool together hard disk space which you can tell the OS to use however you want (kind of like using a volume manager but different). Other than that, there is some difference in hardware naming (such as nge0 vs. eth0 for network interfaces), but mostly everything is the same.

Solaris commands are System V based (as far as syntax goes), rather than BSD (which is what Linux is closest to)... Just enough difference there to make you use the "man" command a lot

ZFS is indeed a main difference but both the concept and the commands are very simple to learn and use, so you can be ready with it quickly. There is even a project to port ZFS to Linux.

OTOH, there are several Solaris 10+ features where Linux has either no equivalent, not very widely advertised ones or simply a different approach.

Some areas that came in mind are Dtrace, (branded) Zones, Resource management, Fault management, Service management, RBAC, LOM, 32 and 64 bit support by the same distribution, Live upgrade, patching, packaging.

Finally, be aware that the default command line utilities found with Solaris are not the ones provided by GNU, and so typically do not support GNU extensions.

Some of GNU utilities are or may be available in /usr/sfw/bin (supported by Sun), /opt/sfw/bin (supported by the community), /opt/csw/bin (Blastwave), /usr/local/bin (sunfreeware.com or locally compiled), ...

Funny. Solaris was originally BSD like and they (poorly, in my estimation) retrofitted it to be SysV like. The resulting hodgepodge of bizarre links made me truly detest looking at devices among other things on Solaris. Things may be different in Solaris 10 - haven't played with that one.

More than BSD Like, Solaris 1 (SunOS 4) was built on original BSD 4.2 then 4.3. Don't forget Sun use to be a start-up company created by one of the original developer of BSD: Bill Joy.
Again not SysV like, but really System V original source code.
SVR4 was designed by AT&T and Sun to merge features from BSD and System 5 Release 3.
/usr/ucb directory remains that.
Too bad, I can't help on that ...
/dev and /devices aren't different in Solaris 10 and up.

That's a bit pedantic isn't it?

"like" meaning "Possessing the characteristics of; resembling closely; similar to".

To me it isn't truly BSD if it isn't from Berkley and it isn't truly SysV if it isn't from AT&T (or NCR for a short while). It's much like saying FreeBSD is like OpenBSD - They're both BSD distributions but do have customized differences just as Solaris has customizations of its SysV implementation that are different from those of HP-UX.

As to helping on the perception of hodgepodge I wasn't asking for any - just stating an opinion (estimation = "An opinion or a judgment").

Definitions provided by:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/

I understand what you mean, my only point was Sun original O/S was BSD, and several major Berkeley developers became Sun employees.

Let's imagine Linus and other kernel developers decide to start a company and build their own GNU/Linux distro. I'm sure he would frown if one would call it a "Linux-like" distro. Okay, that's not strictly equivalent as Torvalds owns the Linux brand.

Similarly, Sun didn't bought an AT&T license, like HP and IBM did, but created SVR4 along with AT&T developers in a cooperative venture by merging BSD 4.3, SunOS 4.2, System V R3 and Xenix features. So Solaris 2.0 was definitely System V Release 4 at that time, not a System V like.

As of what Solaris is today, you right telling it is no more a "pure" SVR4.0, as it has evolved a lot and sometimes diverged during more than 16 years, while SVR4.2 is a different beast somewhere.

How can one dislike such an elegant scheme that name my boot disk /devices/pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0/cmdk@0,0:a

Wow....sounds like there is A LOT that is similar...but at the same time sound like there is A LOT that is different...

Yes, that's a good summary !

Elegant indeed - so long as you keep your secret decoder ring handy...

Not that HP-UX device paths are any less cryptic (one has to learn what the bits of the minor number mean) but at least the paths themselves are easier to traverse.