EE4301 Network and System Administration Assignment 1: Comparing Solaris with Linux

Due Date: 24th September 2013

You are required to telnet or ssh to our Linux and Solaris (Unix) servers to perform this assignment. The domain names of these two servers are Linux server: linux.ee.cityu.edu.hk Solaris server: eda.ee.cityu.edu.hk *user accounts of these servers are independent. Your account information (Username and Password) can be obtained from Mr. CY Cheng in our EE Student Terminal Room (P1442). For security reason, you are recommended to use SSH client to connect to these servers and PuTTY is a good free telnet/SSH client for performing this assignment, which could be downloaded from: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

When you go out into the real world and get a job as a Unix Systems Administrator you may be asked to administer Unix-like operating systems other than Linux. This exercise will give you a comparison between the popular Solaris (Unix) and Fedora Linux distribution. You are required to log into a Unix machine (using your EDA Unix account) and find the answers to the questions below. In this assignment, you will compare those questions for two types of machines: SunSPARC Workstation with Solaris OS and Dell PC with Ubuntu Linux. Notice that the machines may be in various states of configuration, which lead to different results. Furthermore, a machine or two may not have on-line "man" pages installed. Try to fix it by yourself or find the reference for a particular command with your own ways, e.g. WWW. Apart from command line, it should be noted that all the utilities may also support command-line curses-based interface or X Windows interface (they check the value of DISPLAY and decide which interface to use, just like many other X windows applications). For each machine, answer the following questions: 1. What is the IP address?
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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

What is the name and version number of the operating system? How many processors are there? What are their types and speeds? How much physical memory is there? How many disk drives are there? How large are they? How many file systems are there and how are they arranged? What is the name of the Ethernet device? Can you figure out how to see the kernel boot messages? Is there a "dmesg"

command? If not, can you find an equivalent? 9. Which of the two machines is faster? What is your argument for this? **Please tabulate your answers in order to have a better comparison between the two machines. Hints: Possible commands: uname, free, df, ifconfig, dmesg, cat, grep, etc. Possible directories: /proc, /usr/platform/SUNW