The genesis of LKSF

The genesis of LKSF

How it started

In January 2008 I felt like writing short tutorials on less-known features in Solaris.

It turns out that although many of Solaris’ features are known to customers, there are few customers aware of all of Solaris features.

An second insight was a little bit different: Sun doesn’t have a "not enough documentation" problem, it has a problem with "too much documentation". Solaris is a tool with extreme capabilities – all well documented at docs.sun.com or in the man pages. The problem is (vastly exaggerated): it’s like having the Encyclopedia Britannica, sufficient tools, skilled engineers and mechanics and the material, leaving you with the job of building an Airbus 380. While that may be possible, it is difficult to find the right starting point.

"The less known Solaris Features" (a.k.a LKSF) wants to give you this start, and I started writing these tutorials on my blog http://www.c0t0d0s0.org in February 2008.

The scope

The tutorials in this book don’t attempt to explain a feature in its entirety, as that would be redundant to the man pages and docs.sun.com. The examples in this book take some typical use cases and describe the configuration of a feature to match. At the end of each feature you will find some links to more information and the documentation about the feature.

The disclaimer

• Please don’t try the stuff in this tutorial on your production systems until you are familiar with the steps.

• Please obey the licensing note in the Appendix.

Credits and Kudos

Credits

Credits and kudos for providing helping hands (in alphabetic order of the surname):

• Ceri Davies (http://typo.submonkey.net/) for proof reading the document.

• Jan-Piet Mens (http://blog.fupps.com/) for proof reading for the document and suggestions to the LaTeXsource.

• Marina Sum for the help with the pfexec chapter.