Summary

This concludes the discussion of file systems. This chapter discussed the various device drivers and device names used in Solaris 10. I described the Solaris commands and utilities used to obtain information about these devices and drivers. In addition to the devices that come standard with Solaris, this chapter also described Solaris Volume Manager and the added functionality it provides.

Device drivers are discussed in several chapters of this book because they are used in many aspects of the system administrator's job. Devices are referenced when we install and boot the operating system (see Chapter 2, "Installing the Solaris 10 Operating Environment," and Chapter 3, "System Startup and Shutdown"), when creating and mounting file systems, when setting up printers (see Chapter 6, "Managing the LP Print Service"), and in general troubleshooting of system problems. It is very important that you have a good understanding of how device drivers are configured and named in the Solaris operating system.

This chapter also introduced you to the many options available for constructing file systems using the mkfs and newfs commands. Other Solaris utilities for managing, labeling, copying, and tuning file systems were also presented.

The process of creating a file system on a disk partition was described. Many file system creation parameters that affect performance were presented. This chapter also detailed all the parts of a file system so that, as you create file systems, you are familiar with terminology you'll encounter.

The mount and umount commands were described. In this chapter, I explained how to display mount options currently in use on a particular file system. In addition, the chapter showed you how to determine what process or user is using a file system before you unmount it.

In addition to showing how to manually mount file systems, this chapter described the Volume Manager for automatically mounting file systems on CD-ROM and disk. All the Volume Manager commands and associated configuration files were presented and explained.

Finally, the system administrator must monitor all file systems regularly. Commands and utilities used to monitor and manage file systems were described in detail.

Now that we've discussed devices, device and driver names, disk slices, and file systems, the next chapter will introduce the Solaris installation process.