Solaris Experience

I've been working with Solaris ever since the days of SunOS. I helped clients migrate from SunOS 4.1.3 to Solaris 2.1. My actual SunOS experience goes back to the days of Sun's multi-bus Motorola 68000 based systems. I still own two working Sun 3/60 systems (punched out with 4mb of RAM, a 330mb narrow SCSI disk and a SCSI QIC tape drive! One even has Ethernet!).

Typically, my involvement with Sun systems is as a contract administrator. In that capacity, I've helped my clients purchase, upgrade, repair, run and secure their systems. This includes installing and configuring both Oracle and Progress (both Relational Database Management Systems).

I consider Solaris one of the easiest UNIX's I know to administer (that is, until you get into DiskSuite). It is fast, reliable, mostly self-tuning and scales well.

Solaris Work Experience

I've done many things with Solaris. Here's a brief synopsis:

• System Performance Solaris generally performs well but doesn't always take advantage of available resources. I've tuned many Sun systems to support semaphores and shared memory (needed by databases). I've also tuned systems to improve network performance (forced network cards to full duplex) and disk performance (Solaris is very conservative in allocating memory for disk buffers).

• Installation Solaris tends to install in as small a footprint as possible. Additionally, it doesn't install any disk redundancy by default. Since Solaris 8, Solstice DiskSuite is free. Upgrading a system to software RAID 1 (mirroring) is straight forward and provides protection against a disk failure.

• Back Up. Solaris doesn't ship with anything better than tar, ufsdump/restore or cpio. I've configured many Solaris systems to use more reliabile (and robust) third party back up tools. I've also configured machines to do disk image back ups (to disk) as well as done disaster recovery simulations to verify that a machine can be recovered.

  I've also written a number of back up scripts to properly quiet a database, split a software mirror, re-activate the database, back up the mirror and then re-sync the broken sub-mirror. The result is 100% uptime and reliable back ups without expensive on-line back up software.

• Capacity Analysis I've helped clients increase user loads from 300 to over 500 active users on a Sun Enterprise 450 (dual 400mhz cpus)! We were able to do this be correctly tuning Solaris, Oracle and the network. By fine tuning these components, we were able to avoid a costly hardware upgrade.

• Shell Script Programming It is usually the case that poorly written software it the chief contributor to system problems (speed, reliability, availability, etc.). I've fixed many such problems often rewriting software to finish in minutes instead of hours or days.

• Upgrade Assistance Need to upgrade? I can help you spend your money intelligently by determining which hardware upgrades will provide the most bang for the buck. Often a few hours or a day's worth of inspection can save tens of thousands of dollars in needless hardware upgrades.

• Disaster Planning I can provide help with disaster planning. I will help you document your system and prepare a disaster recovery plan that is thorough and effective. Don't wait unitl your system crashes to get this done.

• Disaster Recovery System down? I can help get it going again. I've helped recover dozens of Sun systems that have suffered hardware, administrative or security failures.

• Security Audits How secure is your production server. Do you take advantage of all the latest security features in Solaris 8 or 9? Did you know that it includes a firewall and other anti-hacker tools? I can help assess and harden your system.

• Open Source There is a lot of excellent Open Source security tools available for Solaris. I've used SAMBA to provide seamless integration between HP-UX and desktop systems. No more ftp'ing files to/from. Simply go to Network Neighborhood or My Network Places on Microsoft and move files to/from your HP systems with the click of a mouse. Best of all, the software is free and can be installed over the Internet (securely) within a few hours.

I have two Solaris 8 servers in my office so I can develop locally and ship you the finished result.

Sun Certified System Administrator (CSA)

I've been lazy... I took the first test for Solaris 8 Certified System Administrator certification but haven't bothered with the second test. Maybe by writing this, I'll be motivated to complete the second test and earn the cert.

Migrating To Linux

Are you a Sun VAR or customer who is tired of extremely paying extremely high prices for the systems you get? Want to take advantage of the volume economics and performance of Intel or AMD based systems?

I have both the Sun skills and the RedHat Linux skills to help you plan, implement and verify your migration to Linux from Solaris. I've run RedHat in production environments for years and know what it takes (hardware, software, procedures, etc.) to get the job done right.

Don't postpone looking at Linux and don't waste your time with Sun's Linux distribution. Sun has bailed on Sun Linux 5 and is now recommending either RedHat, SuSE (or whatever the customer wants) for their Intel hardware. They even stated that Sun Linux 5 is esentially "Redhat Linux with a few minor tweaks" (Mar 23, 2003. John Loiacono, VP Sun's Operating Platforms Group).

Sun Solaris Training Content Development

I authored a class called Solaris Administration II that is being marketed by Gloabl Knowledge. I also provided technical editing assistance to the author of Gloabl Knowledge's Solaris Administration I.

SA II is a class for experienced Solaris administrators. We cover RAID Concepts, Implementing RAID with DiskSuite, Configuring DNS, Solaris Kernel Tuning, Solaris Performance and more.

Contact me if you are interested in Sun training at the command line, shell scripting, introductory system administrator or advanced system administrator levels.