Hi,
I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris, or HP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well? Books? Courses? Self-teaching in a home lab?
Thanks,
Ugo
2008/3/6, Ugo Bellavance ugob@lubik.ca:
Hi,
Hi Ugo
I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris, orHP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well? Books? Courses? Self-teaching in a home lab?
Thanks,
Ugo
I recommend you installing OpenSolaris in a virtual or physical machine and build a labor environment.
Buy study guides for Solaris certified System, Network and Security Administrator (for Solaris 10 boxes). OpenSolaris is released under an OSI approved license and pretty innovative.
cheers Simon
I recommend you installing OpenSolaris in a virtual or physical machine and build a labor environment.
Yes.
Buy study guides for Solaris certified System, Network and Security Administrator (for Solaris 10 boxes). OpenSolaris is released under an OSI approved license and pretty innovative.
:-O
Solaris/OpenSolaris comes with GREAT documentation. The only problem is reading through them. There is a lot of it!
I suggest taking things one step at a time. Don't try to go through the documentation all at once. Just look it up when you need to do a step on Solaris be it setup a interface or a nfs share and then repeatedly do that. Say ten times on day one. Then 5 times two days later. Once more a week later. Hopefully you get to do the same procedure once in a while afterwards. If all else fails, just hit the documentation.
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/documentation/
Links to System Admin/Storage/Security/younameit on the left. They are all downloadable so that you do not have to read them on sun's website and they are available in pdf should you fancy printing them out.
This are also the opensolaris mailing lists.
Christopher Chan wrote:
I recommend you installing OpenSolaris in a virtual or physical machine and build a labor environment.
Yes.
Buy study guides for Solaris certified System, Network and Security Administrator (for Solaris 10 boxes). OpenSolaris is released under an OSI approved license and pretty innovative.
:-O
Solaris/OpenSolaris comes with GREAT documentation. The only problem is reading through them. There is a lot of it!
I suggest taking things one step at a time. Don't try to go through the documentation all at once. Just look it up when you need to do a step on Solaris be it setup a interface or a nfs share and then repeatedly do that. Say ten times on day one. Then 5 times two days later. Once more a week later. Hopefully you get to do the same procedure once in a while afterwards. If all else fails, just hit the documentation.
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/documentation/
Links to System Admin/Storage/Security/younameit on the left. They are all downloadable so that you do not have to read them on sun's website and they are available in pdf should you fancy printing them out.
This are also the opensolaris mailing lists.
Oh, great, any ideas about other Unix flavors? (AIX, HP-UX)
On Thursday 06 March 2008, Ugo Bellavance wrote:
Oh, great, any ideas about other Unix flavors? (AIX, HP-UX)
If I were you, I would forget about AIX at least at the beginning until you are solid with Solaris and HP-UX. Yes, it has good market share, but it is too different from everything else.
Until recently I was a lead over a 8 person Unix admin team and our policy was to always hire people with little experience and then move them up as they learn stuff.
I usually started them on Solaris 9. It is the closest to Linux (which most had experience with). Then we went on to Solaris 10 - SMF and so on are a big step forward but you will still find a ton of pre Sol10 out there, so if you don't have Solaris 9 or prior experience, you're not quite there.
Then, the next step is HP-UX. You can get a C3xx0 or J6xx0 on ebay for little money these days. PA-RISC is dead, but once the OS is booted, there aren't that many differences between running on Itanium or PA-RISC.
Finally, if they got that far, we would add some AIX. AIX is very different from what you would expect in a Unix flavor, ODM and all, but then again, Solaris 10 has moved quite a bit away from being a traditional Unix too.
Peter.
Peter Arremann wrote:
On Thursday 06 March 2008, Ugo Bellavance wrote:
Oh, great, any ideas about other Unix flavors? (AIX, HP-UX)
If I were you, I would forget about AIX at least at the beginning until you are solid with Solaris and HP-UX. Yes, it has good market share, but it is too different from everything else.
Ok
Until recently I was a lead over a 8 person Unix admin team and our policy was to always hire people with little experience and then move them up as they learn stuff.
I usually started them on Solaris 9. It is the closest to Linux (which most had experience with). Then we went on to Solaris 10 - SMF and so on are a big step forward but you will still find a ton of pre Sol10 out there, so if you don't have Solaris 9 or prior experience, you're not quite there.
Ok, what about opensolaris? Is
Then, the next step is HP-UX. You can get a C3xx0 or J6xx0 on ebay for little money these days. PA-RISC is dead, but once the OS is booted, there aren't that many differences between running on Itanium or PA-RISC.
Finally, if they got that far, we would add some AIX. AIX is very different from what you would expect in a Unix flavor, ODM and all, but then again, Solaris 10 has moved quite a bit away from being a traditional Unix too.
Peter.
Thanks for your great advice, Ugo
On Thursday 06 March 2008, Ugo Bellavance wrote:
Ok, what about opensolaris? Is
OpenSolaris is the development branch of Solaris. Things like Project Indiana make it look a lot less like Solaris 9 and before do. Everything that is in Solaris 10 is in OpenSolaris plus a lot more - new package management system, new installer, crossbow (network interfaces), ... Eventually, OpenSolaris will become Solaris 11.
The problem you will run into if you concentrate on Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris is that the majority of all Solaris systems out there is still running 9 and earlier. I get around quite a bit these days and my best guess is about 20% Solaris 10, 10% solaris 9 and 60% solaris 8 and 10% earlier releases.
Solaris 8 isn't a good learning target because Solaris 8 x86 lacks drivers for almost everything. The differences between Solaris 8 and 9 aren't that great so you can save yourself a lot of trouble by just using Solaris 9 as the model for pre-10 Solaris.
Peter.
On Mar 6, 2008, at 7:02 AM, Ugo Bellavance wrote:
I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris, or HP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well? Books? Courses? Self-teaching in a home lab?
in addition to the other suggestions, i recommend a copy of Evi Nemeth's "Unix System Administration Handbook" (http://www.admin.com/ Pages/USAH.html). one of the distinguishing features of this book is that for each topic it provides configuration examples for several different UNIX variants, highlighting the differences and similarities.
the current edition is the Third; you may also be interested in the Second edition, which covers some more proprietary UNIX variants.
-steve
-- If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction. - Fabian, Twelfth Night, III,v
Steve Huff wrote:
On Mar 6, 2008, at 7:02 AM, Ugo Bellavance wrote:
I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris,or HP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well? Books? Courses? Self-teaching in a home lab?
in addition to the other suggestions, i recommend a copy of Evi Nemeth's "Unix System Administration Handbook" (http://www.admin.com/Pages/USAH.html). one of the distinguishing features of this book is that for each topic it provides configuration examples for several different UNIX variants, highlighting the differences and similarities.
the current edition is the Third; you may also be interested in the Second edition, which covers some more proprietary UNIX variants.
Thanks, but I find it hard to spend so much on a book that is 8-year old...
Ugo
Hi,
I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris, or HP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well? Books? Courses? Self-teaching in a home lab?
Hello,
here's an interesting resource, though more on the "surviving guide" side ;-) http://www.bhami.com/rosetta.html
--- Vincent Knecht vknecht@club-internet.fr wrote:
Hi,
I was wondering what would be the best way to
learn AIX, Solaris, or
HP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well?
Books? Courses?
Self-teaching in a home lab?
Hello,
here's an interesting resource, though more on the "surviving guide" side ;-) http://www.bhami.com/rosetta.html
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
i have to agree with this recommendation, that is some pretty good stuff man.
Also i am seeing a lot saying about solaris 10, but you can still down load solaris 9. All you need is sign up for a free user account and you can download it.
just my $.000000000000000000000000000000000000000002 :-)
Ugo Bellavance wrote:
Hi,
I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris,or HP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well? Books? Courses? Self-teaching in a home lab?
note that those three are /completely/ different from each other, especialyl when it comes to administration things. AFAIK, AIX and HPUX only run on IBM pSeries power servers and HP PA-RISC/Itanium servers respectively, while Solaris can be run on either Sun UltraSparc or x86 stuff.
On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 5:02 AM, Ugo Bellavance ugob@lubik.ca wrote:
Hi,
I was wondering what would be the best way to learn AIX, Solaris, orHP-UX, for someone who knows Linux very well? Books? Courses? Self-teaching in a home lab?
I found that the best way for me was to stick to one OS, go through Evi Nemeth's Unix and Linux Administration Handbooks and learn what each chapter goes over. Break that one OS multiple times. Then pick up another one. These days for someone at home you can go with Linux, xBSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD,etc ), and Solaris on x86 hardware.
However, for other people this does not work well and it is better to dive into all 3 'flavours' at once.. otherwise they find that they are always saying "well OS#1 is better than OS#2 because its commands are like this or that."
HP-UX and AIX can only be really learned on specific hardware.. I found this limits the amount of self-teaching one can do on these OS's as you end up only with production boxes at some site :). If you have a 'beefy' system at home.. I would suggest installing some sort of virtualization software and then installing a BSD derivative (for learning MacOS etc), a Solaris virtual system and various Linux distributions.
I'm also interested into learning more about other system as well, my question is what should I take a closer look in Solaris? Things like why people choose Solaris over Linux.
Andreas Pedersen wrote:
I'm also interested into learning more about other system as well, my question is what should I take a closer look in Solaris? Things like why people choose Solaris over Linux.
Solaris puts a lot of effort into maintaining backwards compatibility. With Linux, things as fundamental as device names change routinely and you often have to have to recompile things between versions. Centos is pretty good about this within a major release, but the long support life of those releases is an exception in the Linux world and you still find big differences between the major release versions that don't always maintain compatibility.
on 3-7-2008 5:44 AM Les Mikesell spake the following:
Andreas Pedersen wrote:
I'm also interested into learning more about other system as well, my question is what should I take a closer look in Solaris? Things like why people choose Solaris over Linux.
Solaris puts a lot of effort into maintaining backwards compatibility. With Linux, things as fundamental as device names change routinely and you often have to have to recompile things between versions. Centos is pretty good about this within a major release, but the long support life of those releases is an exception in the Linux world and you still find big differences between the major release versions that don't always maintain compatibility.
And the Sun server hardware was very good at what it did at the time. There wasn't any x-86 hardware that could touch it. Besides, nothing could burn through an IT budget like a couple of Sparc 20's. ;-P
Andreas Pedersen wrote:
I'm also interested into learning more about other system as well, my question is what should I take a closer look in Solaris? Things like why people choose Solaris over Linux.
Solaris admins also have a different mentality and approach to things. I am afraid reasons why people choose Solaris over Linux can be quite involved. There is quite a gulf between the mentality of Solaris admins and Linux admins and there are few that have been both to a sufficient degree to see beyond the status quo (I think :D).
I say choose the right tool for the job but that is dependent on the one who will wield the tool.
Christopher Chan wrote:
I'm also interested into learning more about other system as well, my question is what should I take a closer look in Solaris? Things like why people choose Solaris over Linux.
Solaris admins also have a different mentality and approach to things. I am afraid reasons why people choose Solaris over Linux can be quite involved. There is quite a gulf between the mentality of Solaris admins and Linux admins and there are few that have been both to a sufficient degree to see beyond the status quo (I think :D).
These things are complex enough that few people understand both well enough to be sure that all the stuff that has evolved in their company over many years would port over easily to something different. And they tend to have a vested interest in keeping that stuff working...
I say choose the right tool for the job but that is dependent on the one who will wield the tool.
If you have one server doing one job and you are starting from scratch you can think that way. On windows, people have generally been forced to work like that because things break if you don't. On unix, you'll find ad-hoc mixes of jobs that have evolved over decades all running happily on the same box. In that scenario it is much harder to move to something that is not completely compatible.
Andreas Pedersen wrote:
I'm also interested into learning more about other system as well, my question is what should I take a closer look in Solaris? Things like why people choose Solaris over Linux.
we use Solaris and AIX for our large scale database servers. these often have 32 or more risc processors, and multiple fiberchannel interfaces to SAN storage.
our experience is, Solaris and AIX both perform better than linux under heavy IO workloads, and scales to larger servers than are practical with Linux. Some tasks just don't cluster well, a large highly relational database being one of them.
-
Andreas Pedersen -
Christopher Chan -
John R Pierce -
Les Mikesell -
Peter Arremann -
Scott Silva -
Simon Jolle -
Stephen John Smoogen -
Steve Huff -
Steven Vishoot -
Ugo Bellavance -
Vincent Knecht