Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration - Exam 1Z0-821 Tutorials
Updating and Managing Packages / Image Packaging System (IPS)
Subtitles of the Movie (Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration - Exam 1Z0-821 / Updating and Managing Packages / Image Packaging System (IPS))
Let's go over a brief overview of what the Image Packaging System or IPS is. Now first of all it's new to Solaris 11 so you have the pleasure of working with a new Package Manager that's never been used before. It's a little bit different and it replaces the old Package Manager found in Solaris 10 and earlier versions of Solaris, things like SVR4. Now Solaris 11 will still use some SVR4 packages so you don't have to worry about backward compatibility. But it's best to use IPS if you can. Now what IPS allows you to do, is to do basically anything you want to do with a software package. You can list them, you can search them, install them, update them and remove software packages for Solaris 11. Now obviously what you can do with these packages really depends a lot on what your privilege level is. Obviously a normal user is not going to be able to do everything there is with a package. It requires elevated privileges to install an update for example. But a normal user can typically list them. Now software's typically distributed through this Package Management System through Internet or network based repositories. So they sit on a network server or you can get them from the Internet. You can have local package archives on the system itself and point your IPS toward those. Now IPS comes as both a Command Line Interface and a GUI. So for those of you who are Command Line junkies out there, there's plenty to go around with IPS at the Command Line. And for those of you who are more comfortable with the GUI interface, then of course there's that for you as well. Typically like most things in Unix and Linux, what you can do at the Command Line is probably a little bit more and a lot more powerful than what you can do with the GUI. However, it'll take time to learn those things so you can start out with the GUI and still do a lot of things with packages. Now IPS's used to do a lot of different things, so let's discuss some of them here. First of all we know that it can help manage all software on the box and all software means software packages. That's how software is kind of looked at on a Solaris box as a package. You can also manage software publishers, you can add them, delete them and so forth and what a publisher is is someone who puts out or publishes a software package. And sometimes it can be Oracle itself or a third party vendor or maybe even someone from the community. IPS can also be used to manage repositories. You can add or delete repositories or create them. You can point your IPS's to your network based repositories on a server or Internet based repositories or even local repositories on your box. You can also use IPS to create images and an image is basically an installation and you can basically baseline your image, change things with IPS, snapshot it or back it up and then put it out as a bootable environment. And you don't have to make these changes stick, you can revert back to the image you had if you like. So you can test new operating system packages without damaging your system. You can also create and manage boot environments and that's really what these images are, our boot environments. You could have an image that's a baseline image, snapshot it or back it up, make changes to it and boot of that particular image at any time. And you can maintain several of these boot environments. Let's talk about some terms so you'll know what we're discussing when we mention some of these things later on in dealing with IPS. First of all there's a text document called a Manifest and it contains metadata that describes an IPS package. It has information about the repository, about the publisher and so forth and the contents of the package. And speaking of repository, we've already mentioned it but basically a repository is a network or Internet location like on a file server where packages are published to and where you can get packages from. Now typically use something called a Universal Resource Identifier or URI. And it typically looks a lot like a URL you might see in a web address. Now an image is a location where IPS packages can be installed. And that image maybe the image that's on your computer right now. So you would install things to that image you would make changes to that image and possibly boot off that image or revert back to the previous image. Now there's also a thing called a Catalog. And a catalog lists all the packages in a given repository whether it's a network based repository or an Internet based repository. A package archive itself is a file that contains publisher information and the packages that, that publisher provides. And the package archive's typically a local package on your box that you can point IPS to and it can use that package to install software. You also have something called a Mirror. Now this is also a repository, maybe an alternate repository and it can contain package content itself. It may or may not contain all the different things that's in the primary repository. It's just like a secondary storage, an alternate location where you can go to get a package. And finally a Bootable Environment or BE is a bootable instance of an image and the image basically is the operating system and you can have different boot environments. And each of these boot environments can be a little be different, have different software installed on them or even different versions. And you can choose to cycle through these different boot environments and boot to different environments that have different software packages on them. IPS can help you create and manage those boot environments. So those are just a few of the terms that we discuss and you'll get to know some of these terms as we go through the next few sessions when we discuss IPS in detail.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Oracle Solaris 11 System Administration - Exam 1Z0-821 |
| Author: | Bobby Rogers |
| SKU: | 34398 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-083-1 |
| Release Date: | 2012-12-24 |
| Duration: | 8 hrs / 92 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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