Projects

The concept of projects was introduced during later updates of Solaris 8. Projects are now included in the standard Solaris 9 issue and allow much improved tracking of resources and usage. The project concept is extremely useful when multiple projects use the same system and are charged for their usage of the system. In this way, it is now simple to identify and subsequently charge each project based on the resources used. Additionally, a system administrator supporting multiple projects can perform duties associated with those projects so that his time is also “booked” to the project requesting the service. He would do this using the newtask command. See the newtask manual page for further details about this command.

Projects are established using a configuration file, / etc/project. The following example shows the standard /etc/project file:

system:0:::: 
user.root:1:::: 
noproject:2:::: 
default:3:::: 
group.staff:10:::: 

It can be seen from the preceding example that all members of the staff group (group ID 10) belong to the project group.staff.

The system administrator edits this file to create new projects and assigns users and groups of users to the projects. The accounting software can produce reports on usage based on the projects specified in the /etc/project file.

For further information on projects, see the manual page entry for projects as well as the projects command, which lists the projects a user or group belongs to.