ASGAUR

What's Solaris anyway? Solaris(tm) is Sun's name for their UNIX-based user

Why should I upgrade? Solaris 2 is more compatible with the rest of the UN

Should I move to Solaris 2.x now, or later, or never? That depends - on yo

What is Solaris 2? Is it really SVR4 based? Solaris 2 is an "operating env

What machines does Solaris 2.x run on? Solaris 2.0 only ran on desktop SPA

Will my old applications from 4.1.x run on Solaris 2? There is quite a bit

Will my SPARC binaries run unchanged on UltraSPARC machines? Yes. One of

Will my 32 bit IA32 binaries run unchanged on Solaris on AMD64/EM64T? Yes,

Will my old applications from SVR3 on the 386 run on Solaris 2/x86? As wit

Where has the XXX command gone now? There are too many of these changes to

When I upgrade, should I use SunInstall "upgrade", or start over? You can'

Is Solaris 2.x reliable/stable enough to use? The consensus seems to be th

Why do some people dislike Solaris2? There is a number of reasons why peop

Why do some people like Solaris2? There are improvements in Solaris 2.x.

What is Sun doing to help me migrate? Sun has recently started several pro

Can I use my SunOS 4 disks on Solaris 2.x? Yes you can. The on disk forma

How can I enable System V IPC? Ipcs says it isn't configured in. There's n

Solaris 7 is 64 bit, does that affect Solaris/IA-32? No, Solaris 7 on Inte

Solaris 7 is 64 bit, does this mean I can no longer use my old SPARCs? No,

Where can I download Solaris binaries from? The latest Solaris binary rele

What Solaris release am I running on my system? Which Solaris release you

Sun blogs. Many of Sun's engineers now have personal blogs where technical

How can I RTFM when I don't have it anymore? "RTFM" is an old saying: Read

Why is "man -k" so confused? Solaris man uses a manual page index file cal

What Software is available for Solaris 2.x? Most commercial software that

What FTP/WWW sites do I need to know about? www.sun.com Sun's own W

What other FAQ's do I need to know about? 1) Stokely Consulting's lis

What mailing lists should I get? First, read all the USENET newsgroups wit

What books should I read? O'Reilly & Associates specializes in UNIX book

What hardware is supported by Solaris 2.x for x86? The complete list Solar

What is Wabi? Wabi was Sun's MS-Windows-under-unix emulator. Wab

I'm running into some limits of SunOS 4.x, will upgrading to Solaris 2.x help?

How much disk space do I need to install Solaris 2? The FAQ maintainer's p

How can I convert all my local changes that I've made over the years into their co

What are "packages"? A SVR4 mechanism for "standardizing" the installation

Why can't I write in/mount over /home? SunOS 5.x is delivered with the "au

Why can't I access CDs or floppies? Solaris 2.2 introduced a new scheme fo

Why are there no passwords in /etc/passwd? System V Release 4 includes a f

Why can't I rlogin/telnet in as root? >... when I try to rlogin as root ..

Why can't I ssh in as root? You need to set "PermitRootLogin" to "yes" in

How can I have a user without a password? In addition to removing the pass

How can I have a "su-only" user? Starting with Solaris 8, the RBAC facilit

How can I set up anonymous FTP? If you need help, ftp the file "ftp.anon"

How can I print from a Solaris 2 (or any System V Release 4) system to a SunOS4.x

How can I print to a non-Postscript/non-ascii printer? The cheapest way to

How can I print to a networked printer? Before Solaris 2.6, you either nee

Why does lp complain about invalid content types? For better or for worse,

My jobs stay in the queue after printing. It's a known bug, and looks fixe

Are there any alternatives to the system V spooler? Sun has a new printing

What happened to /dev/MAKEDEV? How do I add devices? Device drivers are li

Why isn't my tape/cd player or new disk/device recognized? Devices must be

What happened to /etc/rc and /etc/rc.local? They're now fragmented into 12

What happened to /etc/rc?.d/*? Just when you get used to the /etc/rc?.d/*

Can't I have /etc/rc.local back? No. You can never have rc.local back the

Why are there two versions of shutdown? SVR4 (hence SunOS 5.x) tries to ma

When will somebody publish a package of the BSD (4.3BSD Net2) "init", "getty", and

What has happened to getty? What is pmadm and how do you use it? I was hop

How do I get the screen to blank when nobody's using it? Under 4.1.x you i

And what about screendump, screenload and clear_colormap? You can FTP Jef'

Where did etherfind go? There is a replacement for etherfind, but it has c

Can I run SunOS 4.1.x on my SPARC Classic, LX, SS5, SS4, SS20, Voyager, SS1000, SC

The "find" program complains that my root directory doesn't exist? Yes! Ac

I'm having troubles with high-speed input on the Sparc serial ports. What should

How do I make ksh or csh be the login shell for root? Root's shell is /sbi

What is this message: "automount: No network locking on host, contact administrato

I have all kinds of problems with SCSI disks/RAIDs under Solaris 2.x They worked f

How do I make Solaris2 use my old ADAPTEC ACB-4000 and Emulex MD-21 disk controlle

Should I wait installing the latest Solaris release until there are enough patches

Why are there so many patches for Solaris 2.x? Patches are released for th

What are the ``mandatory'' patches I keep hearing about? The mandatory pat

Which patches should I apply? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." In gener

Where do I get patches from? Sites not sponsored by Sun, accessible for al

Where can I obtain Solaris 2/x86 driver updates? The Solaris x86 dri

Why does installing patches take so much space in /var/sadm? All the files

Do I need to back out previous versions of a patch? No, unless otherwise s

How can I have more than 48 pseudo-ttys? For Solaris 7 and before, edit /e

How can I have normal users chown their files? Add the following to /etc/s

How can I get ps to print %MEM and %CPU? Prior to Solaris 2.4, the OS didn

How can I get the DOS and Unix clock to agree on Solaris/x86? After instal

How can I increase the number of file descriptors per process? In 2.3 in e

Can I install both SunOS and Solaris on the same machine, and choose between them

How do I disable banner pages under Solaris? As root, go to directory /etc

How do I change my hostname? The supported way to change your hostname is:

Can I run multiple terminals on the console of Solaris x86 like those supported on

How can I prevent daemons from creating mode 666 files? Prior to Solaris 8

How do I change the terminal type for /dev/console? Change the "-T sun" in

If I login over the network, my terminal type is set to "sun"/"AT386" How can I ch

How can I change the SYSV IPC parameters? The following parameters can be

How do I enable/disable dtlogin? Whether dtlogin is started or not is sett

How do I configure dtlogin? The standard CDE configuration files live in /

How can I configure a second monitor or change X server options? First, yo

How do I configure my x86 X server? The x86 Xsun server is configured with

How can I have more than 128 X windows clients? When you get the following

Xvnc/Xnest/Xvfb can't create a socket in /tmp/.X11-unix. The permissions t

How can I restrict remote access through dtlogin? Copy to /usr/dt/config/X

How do I disable the 2.6+ configuration assistant? In the file /platform/i

How do I convert SunOS 4.x style /etc/passwd to Solaris passwd & shadow. A

How can I obtain the PROM level without halting my SPARC? prtconf -V

How can I use Solaris 2.6+ formatted disks on SunOS 4.x? Solaris 2.6 incre

Can I use soft mounts with NFS? Technically, you can, but it's like saying

How can I boot a 32 bit kernel when a 64 bit kernel is installed? Sun hard

How can I tell whether I'm running a 32 or 64 bit kernel? The command "isa

How do I get rid of the Solregis pop-up? Some people are annoyed by the So

Where do I get Disksuite for Solaris 8? You already have it. It's on the

Where do I get Disksuite for Solaris 9 and later? You probably already ins

How do perform an old-fashioned interactive install in Solaris 8? Boot fro

Now that Solaris install from several CDs, how can I jumpstart? In order t

How can I grow a UFS filesystem? You can grow but not shrink a UFS filesys

How do I install without starting OpenWindows? boot {net|cdrom} - in

How do I set up Solaris for my time zone and daylight saving rules? You do

I always install my own perl, can I remove the Sun installed one? Sun is p

Where did kgmon go? The kgmon has been obsolete by lockstat. Lockstat has

Why do swap -l, swap -s and /tmp disagree about the amount of swap? First

How do I secure my Solaris system? Arguably the best tested tools are thos

How do I use DNS w/o using NIS or NIS+? Under SunOS 4.1 it was next to imp

What is /etc/nsswitch.conf? An idea whose time has come (it came to Ultrix

What does [NOTFOUND=return] in nsswitch.conf mean? Type "man nsswitch.conf

Can I run a nis/yp server under Solaris 2.x? A number of options have been

Can I run NIS+ under Solaris 1 (SunOS 4.1.x) Sort of, with the NIS+ server

With NIS+ how do I find out which machine a client is bound to? NIS+ clien

Ypcat doesn't work on the netgroup table on a NIS+ server, why? Yes, that

Why is rpc.nisd such a memory pig according to ps? The good news is that i

How do I tell my NIS+ server to service DNS requests from 4.x clients?

How can I have multiple addresses per interface? Solaris 2.x provides a fe

Solaris 2+ supports filesystem sizes up to 16TB. Will this give interoperability

Where can I get an SNMP agent for Solaris? There are several agents availa

How can I use full-duplex ethernet? Sun's hme and later fast ethernet adap

Where can I get BOOTP/DHCP for Solaris? Solaris 2.6 ships with BOOTP/DHCP

What kind of multicast support does Solaris have? All versions of Solaris

How can I have NAT or a firewall on Solaris? There are several NAT and fir

Where can I get an IPv6 capable version of tcp wrapper? The IPv6 capable v

The Solaris 2.x application XX fails with a mysterious error condition. Tr

In Solaris 2.5 nm is slow or dumps core. A bug introduced in the 2.5 local

Why can't I run Answerbook on a standalone machine? This is a bug in OpenW

Why can't I display Answerbook remotely? Displaying answerbook requires su

Why can't I run filemgr, I get ``mknod: permission denied''? This is a sym

Why do I get isinf undefined when linking with libdps on Solaris 2.3? That

I can't get PPP to work between Solaris 2.3 and other platforms. The PPP s

Using compat mode for passwd doesn't work in 2.3? You need patch #101448.

Why do I get __builtin_va_alist or __builtin_va_arg_incr undefined? You're

When compiling, I get "No DATAMODEL_NATIVE specified"? There are two typic

My machine hangs during the boot process. It seems related to ps. When th

Syslogd doesn't seem to log anything. Make sure you have /usr/ccs/bin/m4 i

Syslogd in 2.6 runs with -z -n, what's up? In some cases, syslogd as

I get ``Invalid client credential'' when mounting filesystem on Solaris client fro

After upgrade to 2.4, ls on NFS mounted directories hangs. Starting with S

After installing patch 101945-xx, I have NFS problems (ksh looping). Patch

I messed up /etc/system, now I can't boot. Boot with -as. The kernel will

The /etc/path_to_inst file is corrupted, I can't boot. You will need to re

TCP/IP connections time out too soon, especially on slow links. The tcp/ip

Sendmail connection to non-Unix hosts don't work. With the introduction of

Solaris 2.x can't set up any TCP/IP connections to certain hosts. Solaris

I read 5.21, but I still have connectivity problems. Solaris 2.x will stil

When reading mail on non-Solaris clients of a Solaris mail server, or with non-Sol

Mail/mailx often send reply to wrong user or show wrong sender. Mail/mailx

One of my users can't login (one some machines). In the shadow table/file/

My clients with remote /var (/var/adm) partitions won't boot. Remote, but

Vacation doesn't work reliably in a mixed Solaris/SunOS environment. Vacat

I have a lot of processes. How do I get rid of them? In general

I get /dev/ptmx: No such device when attempting to telnet/rlogin in. You n

I get Could not grant slave pty on telnet/rlogin In Solaris 8 and later yo

ld bails out with msync errors. You probably use a Cray as fileserver. It

su responds with "Sorry" and doesn't prompt for a password. Su won't run u

Why can't I install 2.4 from a non-Sun CD while I could do so with 2.3? Se

ifconfig can't find my network interface Only network devices configured w

I have an application that compiled fine, but when I run it I get: fatal: libfoo.s

Motif programs dump core almost immediately. You must specify the Motif li

cc complains that "language optional software package not installed". Ther

thr_create/pthread_create and other thread functions always return -1 If y

Solaris 2.4 is getting slower over time/seems to have a kernel memory leak.

Why do I get ``Unable to install/attach driver 'xxx''' messages? The kerne

I can't run nfs: netdir_getbyname failure, /dev/udp: bind problem For some

Why do I get ``named[]: rt_malloc: memdebug overflow'' errors? That's cau

The ld command dumps core on Solaris/x86 Solaris 2.4/x86 ld dumps core whe

In Solaris 2.4 my TCP performance is extremely poor. Patch 101969-05 broke

Solaris 2.4 in.tftpd is terribly slow. In Solaris 2.4 a bug was introduced

I get "df: Could not find mount point ..." If the mount point starts with

I changed root's shell, forgotten root's password, and I can't login. If r

How do I boot single user from CD? In order to recover from some problems,

How do I interrupt the system boot sequence on SPARC? As opposed to Solari

How do I reset the NVRAM to factory defaults? During bootup, press down St

When linking C++ programs, I get "_ex_keylock" undefined. You installed a

My NFS server hangs when I get filesystem full/over quota errors. Solaris

OpenWindows fails with "Binding Unix Socket: Invalid argument" This usuall

Why is Xsun such a memory pig, especially on the SX, S24 and FFB? Ps count

Solaris 2.5 and Solaris 2.4 patch 101945-34+ have poor TCP performance over slow links

After install x86 patch 101946-29, I have problems with sockets and TCP/IP through

The commands du and ls show funny block counts on NFSv3 filesystems. The f

When I halt/reboot my system I get "INIT: failed write of utmpx entry" Whe

Patch installation often fails with "checkinstall" errors. When installing

Why do I get a CPU-bound rpc.ttdbserverd process? rpc.ttdbserverd is the R

What is /proc? Can I safely remove the large files there? The /proc files

What does "named[XX]: Lame server on 'hostname' ...." mean? The new named

I installed Solaris on a new/big disk, but now booting fails. Due to limit

I have a problem with large disk drives. Various releases of Solaris have

When I try a network install I get: "WARNING: using boot version 8, expected 9"

My Ultra shuts down with "WARNING: THERMAL WARNING DETECTED!!!" The Ultras

Power management shuts down my monitor, but it never comes back. This is c

I can't seem to disable power management in 2.6! The Solaris 2.6 Xserver i

Power management no longer kicks in when xlock runs Set the XLock.enablesa

Orainst 7.3.2 dumps core in 2.5.1 with patches and in 2.6. Oracle has iden

My dial-on-demand link keeps dialing out, seems DNS related. The nscd (nam

Processes hang in door_call(), hostname lookups hang. The door_call() on /

When using Solaris 2.6, many fonts don't show up properly in Netscape 4. Y

When using virtual interfaces in 2.6, the system picks a random source address. H

A downloaded binary complains "libresolv.so.2: can't open file" Because of

Ypserv/NIS w/ DNS is very unreliable in Solaris 2.6. This is a known probl

When trying to install Solaris 2.x on an Ultra-5/Ultra-10/Ultra-60, it can't find

After the system has been up for a while, freemem is only a couple of MB.

A device driver that worked fine under S2.6 stopped loading under S7 There

I get a lot of "late collisions", what are those? Late collisions are usua

I can't mount an NFS filesystem, I get "RPC: Program not registered". When

How do I automatically NFS share inserted CD-Roms? You need to add the fol

I cannot run remote tooltalk sessions on Solaris 8 displays and recently patched older

Where is all my memory in use? The Solaris kernel operates on the assumpti

Tcpd prints "connect (refused) from 0.0.0.0" in Solaris 8 and later? The d

The permissions on /tmp are wrong after a reboot? The tmpfs filesystems ta

After upgrading to Solaris 9 vold no longer mounts CDs. Starting with Sola

Where is the C compiler or where can I get one? Where have you been? :-) S

Which packages do I need to install to support a C compiler? Solaris ships

Where has ranlib gone? The functionality provided by ranlib in SunOS 4.1.x

What do I need to compile X11R5? There are several "patch kits" for X11R5

I can't compile X11R6 on Solaris 2.4 There are several possible problems w

X11R6 on Solaris 2.4 won't run. Xinit dies with "User Signal 1". Xterms won't die

I get undefined symbols when compiling R6 in Solaris 2.2. Solaris 2.2 does

After compiling X11R6 with gcc 2.7.0, X programs won't find their libraries.

How can I run X11R6 on my SS4 w/ TCX? Although it is possible to switch th

Can I run X11R6 on my SX, ZX, TCX, Creator, Creator3D or Elite3D? X11R6.4

I can't get perl 4.036 to compile or run. You really should be using perl

I can't get sockets to work with perl. Some of the socket constants have c

I have problems compiling MH 6.8.3 The MH config file for Solaris that com

I can't get XV 3.x to compile or run correctly. You need to get xv-3.x fro

What happened to NIT? What new mechanisms exist for low-level network access?

Where are all the functions gone that used to be in libc? The C library ha

I'm still missing some functions: bcopy, bzero and friends. They are in /u

Can I use the source compatibility package to postpone porting? Not really

Why doesn't readdir work? It chops the first two characters of all filenames.

Why do I get undefined symbols when linking with curses/termcap? It is eas

Where are the Motif includes and libraries? Starting with Solaris 2.4, the

When I call semctl(), my program crashes. It works fine elsewhere. The fo

Traceroute to Solaris 2.x machines gives many timeouts. Solaris 2.4 and la

I have problems linking my application statically. In Solaris 2.x static l

I get '"/usr/platform/SUNW,Ultra-1/lib/libc_psr.so.1": not in executable format: f

How can I make Gdb work with Sun's C compiler? Sun's C compiler only store

Does Solaris have problems with dates in the year 2000 and after? Internal

I can't seem to get older gcc releases to work under Solaris 2.6 As with a

Gdb doesn't fully work on Solaris 2.6. Solaris 2.6 defines a new interface

I can't get gdb to compile with Sun's C compiler Older versions of Solaris

Where can I find a list of all Solaris kernel parameters? The most importa

How can I guard my system against stack buffer overflow exploits? By defau

How can I restrict the number of processes per user? Set the following in

What purpose does the maxusers variable serve? The maxusers variable has n

How can I have a clock resolution better than 10ms? Starting with Solaris

How can I have more than 16 groups per user? The number of groups per user

How can I disable _POSIX_CHOWN_RESTRICTED? My users want to chown files?

How can I make the NFS server ignore unprivileged clients? In a restricted

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Most of this material is either written by me or sent to

Archive-name: Solaris2/FAQ Version: $Revision: 1.75 $ Last-Modified: $Date: 2005/04/26 0