Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide

Chapter 6. Host Administration

This chapter introduces user-resource and daemon management from the perspective of a single host. You’ll learn how to use the admintool GUI to add, delete, and modify user records, software packages, serial ports, and printers. Command-line tools for performing similar tasks are also reviewed. Once users and resources are active on a system, it is important to manage them effectively in order to provide continuity of service. You’ll also learn how to interactively manage user access using the Solaris quota tools. Finally, I examine the installation and configuration of network services, such as the sendmail mail transport agent.

User Management

On a multiuser, multiprocess system such as Solaris, it is necessary to have a way of indicating and enforcing rules about ownership, of data either in memory or stored on disks. That’s why every process and file on a Solaris system is “owned” by an account, which is associated with a specific user ID number (UID) and username. On single-user systems, such as MS-DOS, it is not necessary to associate disk files and data in memory with any particular user, since only a single user can be active on the system at any one time. File and process security, based on an authenticated user model, is one of the hallmarks of Unix.

Solaris creates a number of default system accounts during installation, which each serve a specific purpose. For example, the root account is always created with the UID of 0, so that superuser ...