Tag Archives: oracle

Securing the Oracle Solaris 11 Operating System

Solaris 11 is the latest Operating System in the Solaris server OS range from Oracle, previously Sun Microsystems. It incorporates many features from Solaris 10 such as the Service Management Framework, but also pulls a lot from the now defunct OpenSolaris project including a new packaging system and a whole new suite of *adm administrative commands to configure the operating system.

This article will cover security configuration of the OS after a standard text-based installation. I’m using Solaris 11.1 x86_64 running as a VMware Fusion guest, but almost all of the steps will be applicable for the SPARC architecture too.

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How to Network Solaris 11 Zones Under VMware or VirtualBox

Whilst playing around with the changes in zone virtualisation technology between Solaris 10 and Solaris 11, I found that all zones now use exclusive IP, not shared. There is a new anet interface type configured via zonecfg that handles this.

This will all be covered in detail in a future article, but for now take a look at this:

I boot my new testzone, and the vnic is automatically created over net0. But net0 is itself a virtual NIC (i.e. VMware or VirtualBox is virtualising this for us in the first place), whilst Solaris obviously sees it as a physical interface.

Inside the new zone, I was unable to ping anything. The zone was not on the network. The fix? Place net0 into promiscuous mode using snoop inside the global zone. This makes sense when you think about it, and will fix your zone networking allowing you to virtualise within your VM:

Oracle Products: Enterprise Grade Or Just Enterprise Pricing?

I recently worked on a major project for a large organisation implementing over a hundred servers. These servers comprised the entire back-office infrastructure and would provide billing and financial services, order processing and CRM. The software stack chosen was a suite of Oracle products: Oracle eBusiness Suite, Oracle Billing and Revenue Management, Oracle Siebel, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle OBIEE and Oracle DB Enterprise Edition. All very expensive software to both license and support.

I’ve worked heavily with Oracle DB before, and found it to be very stable and robust when sitting on Sun Clusters - however this would be the first time I got to install the software on our new “Enterprise” Operating System - Oracle Enterprise Linux. The reasoning behind the sea of Oracle was that we’d have complete end-to-end support for the entire stack. We’d log one ticket about an issue and someone at Oracle would be able to help. That was the theory, anyway.

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How to Upgrade from Solaris 10 to Solaris 11: Network Preparation

The aim of this series is to show the experienced Solaris system administrator how to transition from Solaris 10 to Solaris 11 immediately after initial installation of the operating system, as well as offering tips, tricks and insights into Solaris 11, which differs significantly from Solaris 10.

This article will cover the commands that will enable both servers to be networked and able to reach the internet.

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