Author: Michael O'Sullivan, Senior Solaris Consultant
My first exposure
to Sun Solaris was in 1994. It was with Motorola
in Cork, Ireland. The standard environment was SunOS 4.1.3_U1 which is of
course Solaris 1.1.1. Most of our users worked on NCD xterms, many of them
being upgraded from black and white to the newer 21" colour ones. The
hardware consisted mainly of Sun Sparc 5s, 10s, 20s and a couple of aging
3/70s. Our main file storage was on an Auspex
system.
Over the following years my experience grew as did our network ... and customer
base. Soon our group was supporting a much more varied technology base, including
two more Auspex systems, several Ultra I and IIs, a 120x8mm capacity Exabyte
juke box with four tape drives, an Apple Macintosh network and an ever increasing
NT network.
Taking care of so many users in a quality driven organisation made it necessary
to come up with new and innovative ways to handle the increasing workload
with more and more efficiency and accuracy. Saving time, meeting deadlines,
managing priorities and often conflicting interests meant that I had to automate
as much of my duties as possible. This was a perfect introduction to scripting.
Soon I was writing scripts in the standard Bourne and Korn shells and experimenting
with Perl. The fun and sense of achievement
was building up.
Having completed my SunOS 4.1.3 Systems Adminstration course in the early
days I then progressed to the Solaris 2.x Systems Adminstration course. There
was still so much to learn. By now I was getting more involved in the quality
side of things while newer members of our group took on the more junior roles.
Solaris