[Nottingham] Solaris

[Jon Masters]

Josh Lock wrote:

> Greetings all,
> 
> I have just got a Solaris 9 box (thanks Richard) so am looking for
> some websites that other Solaris users visit.
> 
> The sort of things I am looking for are:
> 
> Free/Open Source Software packages for Solaris 
> (already found http://www.sunfreeware.com/)

I used to have to spend a long time with pkg-get fetching the 
SunFreeware packages but Sun finally added useful stuff.

Solaris is now just about usable out of the box if you like older GNOME 
and can live with having to use their GUI tools - as far as I am aware 
the Sun Management Console does not run remotely from Linux boxen so if 
you have a slow SPARC you might want to make coffee while you wait.

> Newbie/FAQ sites to help me get all the stuff I want up and running

Sun BigAdmin is interesting. There is a book called Mastering Solaris 
which provides some coverage of the fundamentals for a price.

Other than this I am not inspired by many of the books out there and the 
Sun Blueprints stuff is drying up - Solaris Internals is a good book 
however Sun have allowed that to stagnate horribly and their offering of 
Solaris source is no more unless you an academic and love red tape.

> Also I am hoping to use the box as a server so any tips/software etc
> for protecting it from nasties on the WWW

I would probably not stick a Solaris box online without something I 
trusted in front of it or felt like buying a commerical firewall.

FWIW I have built SMX Minix for more recent Solaris versions and you can 
get hold of a copy if you want to play around with it sometime.

Cheers,

Jon.