Pass Oracle 1z0-821 Exam in First Attempt Easily

Introduction

1. Welcome

Going to look at during this course is the Oracle Certified Associate, or OCA, for Oracle's latest operating system, the Solaris Eleven system. Now, Solaris has been around for quite a long time, having previously been owned by sun until Oracle bought them a few years ago, and there was some doubt in the community as to how Oracle would handle Solaris. But all those fears are unfounded. Oracle has done an excellent job of both continuing Solaris as a fine operating system and enhancing it with Solaris Eleven. So we're going to in this course look at Oracle's first level certification for Solaris Eleven, and that's the OCA, the Oracle Solaris Eleven System Administrator. Now, the OCA Cert is basically an introductory basic level certification, and what it shows is a very basic knowledge in administering a typical Solaris Eleven system. Now, this could be things like installation, typical maintenance, management, creating users and so forth. And we'll go through all this as we look through the course and how to do all this in Solaris Eleven. Now, we'll tell you there are no prerequisites for this course or for the certification. However, it helps if you have some solaris experience, most certainly especially on Solaris Ten, but you don't have to have that. If you've got solaris experience from previous versions, that's great. Or if you're coming from a Linux background or some other Unix background, that will help you out as well. And finally, if you have no experience whatsoever in Linux or Unix or Solaris, don't worry about it. We're going to cover the basics and you'll be able to get right in and study this material on your own and be able to pass this exam. Now, we're going to review all the major topics that we find on the exam as listed officially by Oracle. However, you need to know that we're just going to do kind of a service level review. We're going to show you how to complete commands. We're going to show you how to install the system and manage it. But that's no substitute for intense personal study. While this is an introductory level certification, that doesn't mean you can just go ahead and whizz by and read a book or something and go ahead and just sit for the exam and do well. No, it requires some hands on practical experience, and we're going to give you some of that through out this course by demonstrating some of the concepts you're going to need to know for the exam. But once again, this does require some personal study time. It will definitely help if you set up your own Oracle Solaris Eleven virtual machine or install it on a server that can handle it and practise on it. I would not practise on a production server of any kind, of course, but a laboratory setting would be fine, or even a virtual machine such as what we're going to be using for this course would definitely help you out. A lot.

2. Exam Information

Before we get heavily into Solaris Eleven, let's talk about the OCA exam a little bit first. I think this is a good idea because I want you to know a little bit about the exam you are studying for and the exam you're going to take. Ok. Now Oracle has designated this exam as one C, eight, two, one. So that's the one you'll need to sign up for on Oracle site when you actually sign up for the exam. Now there are 75 questions on this exam, and that doesn't sound like a lot, but 75 questions can come pretty hard and heavy at you. After a few minutes, the passing score is around64%, and that seems like it's not very much. But again, when you're deep in the exam and you're struggling possibly to get the answers right and to make sure you know what you're doing, 64%can seem like a long way off. But don't worry, we're going to prepare you for the exam. And you have about 120 minutes to take the exam. That's 2 hours. So 2 hours to do 75 questions is not too bad. You're going to basically encounter some simple questions or questions that will appear to be simple, simple multiple choice. And there also may be scenario types of questions. Oracle, of course, reserves the right to change the types of questions or the context of the exam at any time. Now the cost will set you back about $300 US. And that's as of this particular time, as of this recording, and that's compared to other certification exams, that's actually not too bad. Now let's talk about the exam objectives for a moment. And it would be a good idea to go ahead and look this up on Oracle site simply because sometimes they will change the exam objectives a little bit. But as of right now, as of the time that I'm recording this, the exam objectives are here in red and there's actually not very many of them. And they cover very basic simplistic management and installation and maintenance tasks for Solaris Eleven. The whole purpose of the OCA exam is to basically see if you can master the fundamentals of Solaris Eleven. And they start off by installing Oracle Solaris Eleven using an interactive installer, and we'll cover all er, and we'll. They also want you to know about updating and managing software packages. And if you're familiar with other versions of Solaris or even Linux, they each have their own package management system such as RPMs or Aptget or something like that. Salary has a brand new package manager that we'll discuss in depth. We also want to look at administering services, and these are a wide variety of different things. When they talk about administering services, that run on the box. We'll also look at setting up and administering data storage. And Solaris Eleven has peculiar ways of administering datastorage and we'll discuss each one of them. We'll also look at administering oracle Solaris Zones. And Zones are kind of an interesting concept that Solaris has had for a few years now. And we'll make sure you're smart on zones as well before it's all over with. We'll also look at administering a physical network, and by that we mean connecting to the network, getting your Ethernet interfaces properly, configure your IP addressing and so forth. We'll look at setting up and administering user accounts, basic creation of user accounts, deletion, setting up their passwords and so forth. We'll also take a look at controlling access to systems and files, and by this we mean permissions essentially, and who can access these systems and files and so forth. We'll take a look at managing system processes and scheduling system tasks because as an administrator you're going to be doing these things on a daily basis with your system. Your system wasn't just created for you to play on, it was created to perform tasks, to perform functions, and we're going to show you how to manage some of those tasks and functions. Now of course, these are the overall exam objectives. Each one of the objectives we just looked at has sub objectives too, that will cover as we go through the course. Those are kind of the overall types of things that we're going to be doing during the course. So it's not really super hard, but there are some things that can get a little complex unless you approach them right. And that's what we hope to do, is approach them right and show you how to do some of these things one step at a time and you'll be able to learn them and see how we do them on the screen and repeat that process yourself. But you're also going to need to practise those exam objectives yourself in a controlled environment such as a labour virtual machine before you take the exam. Now as I mentioned, the exam objectives in this course are very current as of October 2012 and again they are subject to change at oral.

3. Solaris 11 Features

Before we actually let you see Solaris Eleven, let's talk about some of the features that it offers. Now, there's been plenty of versions before Solaris Eleven as recently as Solaris Eight. Nine and Ten were produced by sun, and that was a few years ago, and solaris A Ten was probably the flagship for some systems. Now, Celebrity is the first version that's been released since Oracle bought sun, and they're continuing the tradition of quality and features in this operating system. It's fantastic operating system. You can run it on a wide variety of platforms. In fact, it's supported on both Spark and Intelamdx 86 platforms. So you can run it as a small workstation or as a huge server or as a cloud environment server. As a matter of fact, it's been marketed as the first operating system for clouds. Now, it offers a lot of enhanced features over Solaris Ten that we'll touch on here briefly and talk about throughout the course. Some of the features that it offers, and some of these came with Solaris Ten. Some of these are a little bit of improvement. The Oracle Solaris Zones, that's an OSlevel virtualization technology and different operating systems are assigned to these zones, and they're configured and have their own applications, package management, security and so forth. And we talk about zones quite a bit throughout the course. Something that's brand new to Solar Eleven is the new Imaging Packaging System, or IPS. This image packaging system takes the place of previous package management tools that you would find with previous versions of Solaris. We also have the Oracle Solaris ZFSfile system, which is very robust, offers some significantly advanced storage features, provides storage for zones, integrated storage, and offers a wide variety of security features and resiliency. Speaking of security, there's a lot of improved security features and mechanisms that we'll go over throughout the course as well. And one thing that Solaris Eleven does, that a lot of operating systems don't do, and it's predictive self healing. And what this means is it tries to automatically diagnose isolate issues, mitigate problems, and it helps you recover from a lot of hardware and application faults. So it tries to take care of itself, it tries to reduce its administrative overhead to very little, and it does a good job of that. Of course, you still have to intervene as an administrator occasionally and do things for it, but select Eleven is feature rich and will try to help itself prevent problems. So what's talk about some of these features as we go through the course. We'll hit zones, pretty good security, IPS and so forth. We'll talk about a lot of these things in depth.

4. Introduction to Solaris 11

Now that we've talked about Solaris Eleven a little bit, let's actually look at it. What I want to do now is take a quick tour of Solaris Eleven, kind of a driving or wind shield tour of the operating system, if you would. What we're going to do is look at the live CD that Oracle produces and that you can download in VirtualBox. Now Oracle makes VirtualBox,it is virtualization software. It can be used to help create and view and interact with virtual machines. And this live CD that we're going to look at, we're going to treat it as a virtual machine. You can boot your computer off of a live CD so that you don't make any changes to the system and you can actually use Oracle Solaris Eleven or you can load it into a virtual machine and have this virtual machine run on another Linux box, a Solaris box or even a Windows box as we're doing here with Windows Seven. So let's go ahead and take a look at Oracle's Solaris Eleven installation live CD in Oracle's VirtualBox. All right, we're looking at a Solaris Eleven desktop and again, we're using the live CD. So we could have booted our system on this, but we're going to actually just play it in the Oracle virtual box. And what we're seeing here is the default desktop that comes with Solaris Eleven, the live CD and there's a few icons on the desktop, the Oracle Solaris Live CD itself that we can browse. We can also install the Oracle Solar to our hard drives from this live CD and we're going to do that in a future session. We have a partition editor and a device driver utility. So these are the basic tools we would need to get Solaris Eleven installed and running on our machine. Now there's a couple of things I want to show you. The top line menu, obviously, I will show you here in just a second, but you can see the bottom task bar here and it shows you applications that are open. Plus you can switch to different virtual desktops as well. Now the top line menu, if you're a Linux user or a Solaris user, should actually look very familiar to you. It looks like several different distros of Linux to be honest with you. And I think that's intentional from Oracle. I think they've done a very good job of making Solaris Eleven look a lot more like Linux because that would make it easier to learn and easier to adapt to for most Linux users. If you're a Windows user, obviously this will look a little bit different for you, but it's actually very easy to learn. Let's take a quick look at the topline menu here. Just going to give you a brief tour of some of the things that you'll see here. Now we have things like the applications topline here and it contains things like accessories, developer tools, graphics and so forth. As you can see there are some good default applications and tools that come with Solaris Eleven by default firefox web browser, very popular the Thunderbird Mail client which is my favourite office tools, sound and video tools and so forth and we'll have a chance to go through some of these as we go through the course. The places part of the top line menu here. Basically it gives you the opportunity to browse the system and look at particular folders such as documents, pictures, videos and so forth, or to browse the entire computer and look at different parts of the file system. The system portion here allows you to go and look at Preferences, administer the box and make different configuration settings. Obviously you've also got some icons up here at the top such as the Home icon which takes you to your home folder, fire fox and Thunderbird icons, the package manager icon and also the terminal. And speaking of the terminal, let's open it very quickly, just take a quick look at it and it's basically set up like you would expect from a Linux or Solaris box. You can make different changes to it, you can make it easier to see and change the colour in the background and the fonts and so forth as I've done here. And basically from the terminal you can execute any system command or script or whatever you like from the shell prop here and run the system and we'll actually be using the shell prompt quite a bit throughout the course. So this is a quick tour of Solaris Eleven just to kind of get a look and feel of it and it's actually not very difficult to use and you'll get the opportunity to do some things with it in sessions coming up and in a few moments in another session we're actually going to install Solaris Eleven from this desktop.

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Installing Oracle Solaris 11

1. Exam Objectives

One of the first OCA exam objectives that we're going to cover is actually installing Oracle Solaris Eleven. Now, the exam objective calls for us to install it using an interactive installer. That's the very basic, quick, most easy way to install Solaris Eleven is with the interactive installer, although you should know there are other ways to install it as well, and we'll briefly mention those as we go through. We may not demonstrate them, but we will talk about them now under this major objective here, installing Oracle Solaris Eleven using the interactive installer. There are many sub objectives that we'll look at. Now, first of all, we want to plan for the installation, obviously, because there's things you need to look at, things like hardware requirements, what you're going to use the server for, or workstation for that matter, what kind of applications you're going to be using. We'll look at installing it, actually looking at the installation with the interactive installer, of course, and we'll discuss the different methods involved with installation. We will also verify the operating system installation itself. We'll look at some files to make sure they installed correctly, make sure services are running and so forth. And we'll troubleshoot any installation issues. We'll talk about what you need to do if there are issues with installation, and typically there won't be. Solaris Eleven is very resilient and very robust in its installation process. It's also very easy to install, and in the end, if it's not installed correctly, you can always reinstall it with no problem. Last thing we'll look at under installing Oracle Solaris Eleven is accessing the open boot Prom or OBP. And that's basically one of the things we look at when we install on a Spark system. So we'll talk about all these topics here in the next few sessions, and you'll get a good idea of how to install Solaris Eleven and how easy it is.

2. Planning the Installation

Before we actually insert the disc into the machine and start the boot process and install Solaris Eleven, there's a little bit of planning involved, and this is actually one of your exam objectives. And, in terms of the exam, turn, and really, in terms of real life, planning entails several things, some of which we have listed on the screen. First of all, we want to talk about what we're going to use the box for, whether it's a workstation or server, or even whether it's going to be a major server in the cloud and handle cloud computing type of services. And speaking of services, that's another thing we want to look at too: what kind of services are we going to run on this box because that may affect the type of installation we do? We also look at available hardware for a workstation. The hardware requirements are obviously a little bit less than they are for a server. And for a server that's handling a large cloud infrastructure, the hardware requirements are even higher. Let's talk about our use first. Now we can install Solaris 11 and use it as a workstation or a server. In fact, it's very easy to do both, and we can use different installation methods based on what we want to use it for. The installation method also depends on the services and applications we require; the live CD versus the text installer CD contain different software packages. So, if you're just going to install a workstation, for example, the live CD may be the better way to go because it contains most, if not all, of the applications you'll need to start upright using Solaris Eleven as a workstation and it starts the services that you'll need. The typical service automatically. If you're going to install from a server or if you even have a workstation that does not have a high-end graphics card, then you might want to use the text installer instead because it does not use a GUI to install itself. A straight text installation is still fairly easy, but it's only text. And at the end of the installation, when it's up and running, you only get a shell prop; you do not get a GUI. And for most servers, that's all you need. And you'll find that you'll probably be administering Solaris 11 at the command prompt or shell prompt a lot. The other thing about the text installer disc is that it has different software packages. It has the large server install package that you would use if you're installing server services. So that might be another consideration for if you're going to use it as a work station or service and which type of installation method you're going to use. And we're going to look at both the text installer and the live CD GUI installers when we demonstrate to you how to install Solar Eleven. coming up in a different session. Now, as far as services go, there are different services you're going to install on the box, depending upon their role. These can be network services, file sharing services, for example, or maybe authentication services. Maybe it'll run a website or even a database. Typically, most of these services will be installed on some type of server platform. Not typically a workstation platform, although it's possible you could have a small web server or small database server or even file services on a workstation. So this dictates what kind of installation you have to do, and you probably need to know the role up front and what it's going to do and what type of services it's going to run before you install it. Now there's a lot of available hardware that you can install Solaris 11 on, and some installation methods have different hardware requirements. For example, it's typically a platform issue (Spark versus X86) as to which installation method you might use. For example, the live CD will only install on an X86 platform. The text installer will install on both X86 and Spark. So if you're going to use Spark, you typically want to use that text installer disk. There is a special disc just for Spark. Anyway, when you download the ISO's for SolarisEleven, you typically will have to choose between an X 86 and a Spark platform. Now, the available hardware that it runs on is actually very minimal, but it really depends on what type of box you're going to install, whether it's a server or a workstation, and we'll cover some of the hardware requirements a little bit later. Some of the hardware considerations that we will look at are memory; of course, having a good bit of memory is important for a graphics card, whether you're going to run a GUI installation or not. And of course, disc space. Some installation options require a certain amount of disc space to be allocated and partitioned. Some of the other considerations that you need to look at in planning are multi-booting, if you'll be booting it with a Windows system, for example, or another Linux system, and partitioning. As I mentioned earlier, some partitions are required to be a certain size depending upon what kind of installation you're going to run and what platform you're going to run it on. There are also device drivers you need to look at, as different devices on the system you're going to be using may not be supported by Solaris 11 right out of the box. So you may have to go get devicedrivers in advance that Solaris Eleven supports. And, of course, there is a wide variety of device drivers available, and you can get more information on your specific device driver from the manufacturer's site, the Solaris Eleven site, or various community sites. We haven't talked about everything there is to know when planning an installation, and some of these things will come up as we go through installing the system. We'll talk about a few more hardware requirements and so forth. But the key is to make sure you know what you're installing and where you're installing it, and what you want out of the box when it's completed. Those are the key things in planning the installation.

3. Interactive Installer pt. 1

Now, let's talk about the interactive installer, and we're going to talk about it over the next several sessions. There are several methods for installing Solaris Eleven. There's the Interactive, which we are going to focus on because is its part of the exam objectives and the automated installer. Now I'll mention the automated installer a little bit later on in the session, and we'll talk about it a little bit later on in the course as well. For now, let's talk about the interactive installer, since that's part of the exam objectives. The interactive installer uses either a text-based CD to install or what's called the Live CD. There's also a method for doing an over-the-network installation by connecting to a network server. And the Live CD itself is basically for standalone installations. You're putting a CD into a machine, and you're installing that machine. The text installer, on the other hand, can be used for standalone installations as well as installation from a network server. Let's discuss the Live CD a little bit. The Live CD can only be installed on the X86 platform, not the Spark. Now, when we talk about X86, we're talking about the traditional PC architecture and server architecture that you'll find in probably 80 or 90% of the PCs, laptops, and servers in the world. The X86 is basically an Intel or AMD type of platform. Now, the Live CD lets you boot into Solaris 11 and make no changes to your system. It doesn't install on the hard drive initially, and it doesn't do anything. You can always go back to the operating system you had before with no problem by simply rebooting the computer. But this gives you the opportunity to try it before you buy it. You can actually do work on the Solaris Eleven Live CD, and you can do all kinds of things with it. So you may be asking yourself, well, why don't I just do that rather than install it? Well, installing it actually helps you out with hardware. The performance is much better if you install it. And truthfully, if you're going to have a long-term installation, it's best to just go ahead and install it on the hard drive. The Live CD contains software that is better suited for a desktop or laptop installation, such as a workstation software package. In fact, the package that is installed with the Live CD is called Solaris Desktop. Now, the text installer, on the other hand, can install on a Spark platform, which is the native Sun Solaris Legacy platform, or it can install on the X86 chipset platform. It can be used on systems that really don't have or need higher-end graphics cards because, really, for a server, you don't really typically need those. The text installer also requires less memory than the LiveCD because it doesn't use all the fancy graphics. The other thing the text installer can do for you is give you the ability to configure the network on a much more detailed basis. You can install and configure DNS zones, LDAP, and so forth. So obviously the text installer CD is really meant for a server package. In fact, the software set that's on the CD itself is the Solaris large server package set, as opposed to the Solaris desktop set. So that really makes a difference as to which version of the install—the interactive installer—you want to use. Sure, you can use the Text Installer to install a workstation, but most people probably won't do that. So you'll really use a text installer on a server or where you have no high-end graphics card or when you don't have a lot of memory, and so forth. You'll use the live CD primarily when you want a desktop or workstation. Now, the live CD and the text installer CD both have default credentials that are built into them. There's a user account named Jack, and the password is Jack for the root account; the username is root with the password of Solaris. Now, when you install from the live CD, the root password is automatically changed to the same password as the user password you create in the installer CD. That's not the case. You have to select a unique route password. The other thing is, after you install the live CD, the root account is actually forced to go through a password change. So it can't be the default password for Solaris after that. Now, one more thing we'll talk about just very briefly, and that's the automated installer, not the interactive installer. We use that to install media for only one system or when setting up a network image server to install multiple systems across the network. Now, this isn't the same thing as an over-the-network install like we were talking about earlier, and again, we'll discuss this a little bit later in the course since it's essentially not one of the exam objectives. It's more of an advanced topic, but we will mention it and talk about it a little bit later. It requires an AI manifest, which is basically an XML file of all the different settings you would have for different types of solar. eleven boxes on the network. I had mentioned to you earlier that we would talk about hardware requirements later and the reason I wanted to do that is because the hardware requirements really are based upon the version of the interactive installer that you use. For example, the live CD requires one gig of memory at minimum and a minimum disc space of five gig with a recommended of seven. The text installer uses the same amount of minimum memory but only requires 2.5 gigabytes of disc space, with a recommended 4.5 gigabytes. And the automated installer is listed there too. And it obviously requires a recommended of 13 gig. So the hardware requirements do vary by installer, and that's the reason we've mentioned them now. So in the next session coming up, we're going to go ahead and install using the interactive installers, the live CD, and the text-based installer.

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