Summary

This chapter described Solaris processes and the various Solaris utilities available to monitor them. Using commands such as ps, prstat, pargs, and sdtprocess, you can view all the attributes associated with a process. In addition, I described foreground and background jobs.

The concept of sending signals to a process was described. A signal is a message sent to a process to interrupt it and cause a response. You also learned how to send signals to processes to cause a response such as terminating a process.

The concept of projects and tasks was introduced along with two new scheduling classes available in Solaris 9, the FSS and the FX.

Setting process priorities was described. The various commands, such as nice and priocntl, that are used to set and change process priorities were described. In addition, I described how to use the crontab and at facilities. You can use these facilities to submit batch jobs and schedule processes to run when the system is less busy, to reduce the demand on resources such as the CPU and disks.

Finally, I described the syslog messaging facility. syslogd is the daemon responsible for capturing system messages such as warnings, alerts, and informational messages. You should monitor these messages proactively to resolve problems that could be occurring on your system.

The system administrator needs to be aware of the processes that belong to each application. As users report problems, the system administrator can quickly locate the processes being used and look for irregularities. By keeping a close watch on system messages and processes, you’ll become familiar with what is normal and what is abnormal. Don’t wait for problems to happen—watch system messages and processes daily. Create shell scripts to watch processes for you and to look for irregularities in the system log files. By taking a proactive approach to system administration, you’ll find problems before they affect the users.

The next chapter discusses system security and describes both how to protect your systems from unauthorized access and how to secure the data on them.