Networked System Administration Tools from Sun Microsystems
With the advent of the Solaris Management Console 2.0 (SMC)—introduced in the Solaris 8 Update 3 (1/01) release—Sun Microsystems, Inc., provides a suite of network-aware system administration tools.
With SMC, you can manage a Solaris server from almost anywhere—from a browser, from any Solaris workstation or server, from a Windows NT server, or as a standalone system. You can also plug SMC into other systems' consoles.
SMC software provides a consistent, easy-to-use interface for managing and administering a Solaris server, the clients of the server, and the applications running on the server. You can use the SMC console to monitor and tune applications and to administer user-written or third-party applications and tools.
In addition to the base components of the Solaris Operating Environment, you can consolidate the management functions of Solaris-branded optional products in SMC. The interface provides a familiar X Window look and feel, with point-and-click navigation, tab panels, and wizards.
The SMC Toolbox
SMC uses a toolbox as a common user interface to provide a view of various system administration tools or applications. A toolbox enables you to group tools in a consistent hierarchy. An SMC toolbox is a hierarchical collection of folders, tools, legacy applications, and links to other toolboxes that have been registered with the smcconf(1M) command. The root toolbox is called Management Tools. The default behavior of SMC is to look for a toolbox on the host system (This Computer) and link to it when SMC is started.
SMC comes with a default toolbox that contains the following tools:
System Status:
Processes—Use to suspend, resume, monitor, and control processes.
Log Viewer—Use to view application and command-line messages and manage log files.
System Configuration:
Users—Use to set up and maintain user accounts, user templates, groups, mailing lists, and administrative roles and rights. Grant or deny rights to users and administrative roles, to control the specific applications that each user and role can work with and which tasks each can perform.
Services:
Scheduled Jobs—Use to schedule, start, and manage jobs.
Storage:
Mounts and Shares—Use to view and manage mounts, shares, and usage information.
Disks—Use to create and view disk partitions.
Devices and Hardware:
Serial Ports—Use to configure and manage existing serial ports.
You can use the SMC Toolbox Editor, described later, to change the default configuration.