1z0-821 Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration – Conclusion

1. Resources

Now that we’ve gotten through the course, there are several resources I’d like to give you to help you in your quest for studying for the OCA exam and to be a better Solaris Eleven administrator. Now, most of the resources I’ll tell you about are on the Oracle site itself, and they’re very easy to find. You simply have to search under the products on the site for Solaris Eleven, and it’ll give you a wide variety of resources that are available to you to use to study for the exam and to just help you get to know Solaris Eleven a lot better.

Now, most of these resources aren’t tailored specifically for the exam or the objectives. However, things like the documentation have a lot of good information on things like ZFS zones and IPS and so forth that you can read on and learn about those particular features. Now, the URLs are listed on the slide here, but understand that from time to time, URLs do change as websites change. So if these URLs don’t work for you, again, simply search for Solaris Eleven and you’ll find them. Some of the resources that you’ll find on the Oracle site include downloads, and this is particularly useful because it has the Solaris Eleven virtual machines that you can download, or you can download the ISOs themselves of the Solaris Eleven operating system and install the virtual machines or onto a physical server yourself and play with it.

Also, the documentation for Solaris Eleven is on the site. It’s a very complete library of documentation. There’s just tons of information there for you. Again, it’s not written specifically for the exam. It’s really written so you can get to know Solaris Eleven. In addition to this, there’s also things called cheat sheets that are on the site that will help you accomplish tasks very quickly, very specific tasks in Solaris Eleven. Now, I’ve also included a couple of resources in this course that I’d like you to have to study for the OCA.

First of all, I’ve developed a command reference for you that highlights some of the most commonly used commands during the particular topics we’ve talked about and that will help you study for the exam. So if you practice with the Solaris Eleven operating system and practice using these commands, you’ll master most of the commands that you’ll need for the exam and in real life. The other thing I’ve put together for you is a practice exam. And basically it’s just a quick 75 question exam to help you gauge your knowledge of the topics and of Solaris Eleven to help get you ready for the exam. And I’ll talk about both of these particular resources in depth in another session.

2. Command Listing

I mentioned earlier that one of the resources we’ve put together for you and included in the work files for the course is a command listing. And what we’ve done is basically called all the commands that we’ve talked about in various parts of the course, things that apply to the different exam objectives and kind of organize them and categorize them for you in kind of a listing that you can use. This is a reference to help you study for the OCA exam. What you can use them for is basically to study them and memorize them. But you can also sit with a Solaris Eleven install and go through them one by one and do things like create ZFS pools, install ZFS file systems, run the package command, and do things like that to really get familiar with the commands and study them for the exam. Now, this will help you not only for the exam, but also help you in real life. Now, obviously, we can’t put every single command in there that you would ever find in Solaris Eleven, probably not every single command, even that you might see on the OCA exam, but we’ve given you pretty much most of them. It’s not an all inclusive list, but it’ll help you with the most common commands and what I think are the most likely that will be tested on the exam.

Now, you should use this as a supplement to the man pages and the online help and documentation that Oracle provides to help you study for the exam. You may want to study more than just the command listing I’ve given you because I really don’t feel you should study for an exam. Just using one resource, that’s never a good idea. Always use multiple resources, if you can, and the Oracle site provides some very good documentation that will give you you a lot of these commands that you’ll encounter in real life and on the exam. But I will tell you that the resource I’ve put together for you will help you a lot. So please take the time to study it and I hope it helps you out.

3. Practice Exam

Let’s talk about the other resource I provided for you on the disk under the work files and it’s called the Practice Exam, basically. And what I’ve done is I’ve put together 75 questions for you, very similar to the actual exam. It’s a multiple choice exam. However, there are no interactive questions and you may find some of those on the exam. Now, these questions are very similar to those found on the exam, but let me point out they are not actual exam questions, but they will question you on topics that you should be familiar with now that you’ve completed the course.

And if you’ve studied quite extensively on your own and practiced with the operating system, you should do just fine on the Practice Test, on on the real test. Now, these questions that I put together for you covers all the objectives and I’ve also provided an answer key for you so you can check yourself and see how well you’re doing. Now, the practice test is pretty good. However, again, it’s no substitute for studying. You really have to study for this exam and you have to get some hands on practical experience and learning with Solaris Eleven, the operating system itself. So in addition to the practice exam and studying the other resources I’ve told you about, you really just need to install the operating system on a spare box or in a VM and just play with it, break it, tear it up, create ZFS pools, install packages, just do all kinds of things with it, create users and so forth and manage them.

You’ll learn better this way, probably better than you will doing anything else. But these other resources are here to help you pass the exam as well and do well on it. Let me go ahead and show you really quickly a little bit of the file I’ve put together for you. Now, this is just a draft and the completed version will be on the CD for you. There are 75 questions and as you can see, I’ve put the answer key there with you. So you can actually take this, print it out, take the test, write the answers down somewhere, and then come back and check. There’s two versions of the exam on here. One without the answer key, one with the answer key, and just scrolling through here, first couple of pages. They’re not very difficult and I’ve tried to make it so it covers a wide variety of things, covering all of the different objectives that we talked about. So use this resource study for the exam, study these questions and practice and you’ll do well.

4. Course Wrap Up

Wow, it’s been a good long course and I think I’ve gotten a lot out of it. I’ve enjoyed it and I’ve actually learned a few things during this journey and I hope you have too. Now let’s do a quick wrap up and pretty much just type some loose ends and talked about what we talked about. First of all, we covered the primary objectives for the OCA on Solaris Eleven. This is a very interesting level exam. It’s not difficult. However, you will need to study and learn the objectives and the material very well. We talked about installing Oracle Solaris Eleven using the interactive installer, and we looked at different ways to install Solaris Eleven and some of the different options we have to use in order to get it on the box. We also looked at updating and managing software packages using IPS, the new image packaging system that comes with Solaris Eleven.

We also talked about using SMF to administer services and how it interacts with legacy services on the box, as well as Solaris Eleven specific services. Then we looked at setting up and administering data storage. We looked at ZFS pools and how to manage them and what they are. We looked at how to do all kinds of things with them. And with the ZFS file system. We looked at administering Oracle Solaris zones, basically the virtualization product that comes built into Solaris Eleven. We also looked at administering a physical network, basically. We looked at configuring network interfaces and making sure they work on the box and talking to resources outside of our own box.

Now, while we didn’t go into a lot of networking technologies that basically affect things off of our system, we did talk about how to get our system to work with the physical network, configure the interfaces and so forth. We also looked at setting up and administering user accounts, because basically you don’t have an operating system that’s just there for its own health, you have users that use it. So we looked at the different commands like user add, user mod and so forth, to set up and administer user accounts. We also looked at access control, specifically controlling access to systems and files, and how we do that in Unix and Linux in general, and in Solaris Eleven specifically. We also looked at managing system processes and scheduling system tasks, because the system has to have processes that do things, demons that run, services that run, and the system will perform tasks that we don’t always have to be there to get it to do.

We can schedule these things, and we looked at how to manage those things. Now, for the exam, I will tell you just a couple of pieces of free advice. First of all, focus on concepts and definitions. Learn what everything is and how it works. Know the different features and the different services that are provided by Solaris Eleven. Know particular things about the features, how to configure them, how to install them, how to manage them. Be familiar with all of your utilities, both the GUI and the command line interface. You will get asked about commands on the exam. The best advice I could give you is practice with the operating system. Install it into a virtual machine in VirtualBox, or install it to an actual physical system. It doesn’t matter.

Configure it to be on a small network and do things on it, like install packages, set up ZFS pools in the ZFS file system, and so forth. Add users and groups and configure them, set up roles for them. Basically, if you go through and do all these things, you’ll learn much better this way than any other way, really. Also, review all the VTC course sections that we’ve covered. You’ll be able to retain the material and get a better idea by watching the videos and watching the actual demonstrations of the concepts as well as the explanations for them by reviewing the course.

Another thing I’ll advise you to do is go ahead and read some of Solaris documentation that’s actually on the site. It’s very good documentation, it’s well written and it covers a lot of the basic topics as well as in more advanced topics. And while it’s not written specifically to help you pass the exam, it’s a great resource to help you study for it. And probably another good piece of advice I could give you is study, study, study. The more you study, the more you practice, the better you’ll know the materially and the better you will do on the exam. And more importantly, the better a Solaris Eleven administrator you’ll be in real life. I wish you good luck on the exam. I hope you do very well. I believe you will, and I’ll see you again in another VTC presentation.

• Category: Uncategorized