Dear Friends

I have worked as windows support for over 3 years now and i have found my self a job as Systems Admin for a company, the company primarily use Solaris 9

I have played with Linux little bit i am good as a end user in linux not as Admin

I have to report to this position in a weeks time.

Can some one please tell me how do i go about?

I mean what sort of book i should be reading ? what websites i can get help ? Any hints?

What is the usual things that you real Solaris System Admin do in your job?

Your suggestions are highly appreciated

Thanks

The first thing that you can do is to download and install Open Solaris. It is free for personal use.

The last time that I administered Solaris machines I performed a fairly wide scope of tasks. Typical system administration duties.

Install operating system patches.

Upgrade the operating system.

Install and upgrade database software.

Write little routines to make the database administrator's job easier.

Maintain backups.

Manage disk space for changing end user requirements. That changed more than you might think. The end users included an in house database team that constantly changed their procedures.

User account maintenance.

Implementing and monitoring security stuff.

Upgrade hardware.

Capacity planning.

Diagnose numerous types of problems, mostly caused by the network administration group.

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You should definitely learn to use the vi editor. You don't have to become really great at it. Just be able to use the arrows to move the cursor around in a file, learn how to insert and delete characters, and learn how to exit saving changes and how to exit without saving changes.

I don't want to be too discouraging but I'm afraid Solaris system administration isn't a skill you can acquire in a couple of weeks, especially if you have no experience with another Unix/Linux similar job.

As stress_junkie already pointed, the range of tasks a system administrator is expected to do is quite wide and depends on the company applications and requirements.

By the way, Solaris (the commercial release) is free for any use, including in production, so you can directly start by downloading Solaris 10 11/06 and experiment with it.

I didn't know that you could use Solaris commercially for free. I haven't kept up with Sun's products for several years.

I have to agree with you about the amount of time required to become good at system administration on any platform. If you are lucky enough to get into a position to work with someone else who is already good and if you are lucky enough to be given a wide variety of tasks then I would say that it would be at least a year before you would become familiar enough with the system to call yourself an entry level system administrator. (That was a long sentence!) The first year you are pretty much dead weight. If you only manage user accounts then it will take longer to become familiar with the system.

OpenSolaris is not just Free but Open Source so, you could use OpenSolaris for any use you want!
The License of OpenSolaris is CDDL and it is listed on the site like a open source license. The source code of OpenSolaris is available too.
There are few distros too. The classic Solaris 10 Express (Based on the open source code of solaris) and some other Sun independent distributions like Nexenta, Belenix, Schilix.
All these are LiveCD distributions but you can install them on your hard drive too.
Nexenta is suitable for a users that are coming from the Linux environment. It uses .deb packages as well as the ordinary solaris ones.

Yes, the CDDL is approved by the Open Source Initiative, and is mostly the same one as Mozilla (Firefox/Thunderbird) MPL. OpenSolaris is the source code and the community. There is no binary distribution named OpenSolaris. Don't confuse Solaris 10 and Solaris Express.
Solaris 10 is the version released and fully supported by Sun.
Solaris Express is a preview of the next release of Solaris (codename Nevada, likely Solaris 11).
There are actually two versions of it:
- Solaris Express Community Edition: released each couple of weeks with minimal testing and no support
- Solaris Express Developer Edition: released each 3 or 4 month, includes development tools, more thoroughly tested, but still "beta".
Although quite stable, none of them are recommended for real production.