Summary

As an administrator, you hope that printing and processes will present no problems but, unfortunately, they sometimes do. This chapter focused on the fundamentals needed to understand printers and processes and the skills needed to manage them.

The printing section started by discussing print terms that you need to be familiar with and the core print service in Solaris, the LP print service. It covered commands used to manage printers, as well as log information for troubleshooting help.

Then, the discussion turned to setting up printers, both through Solaris Print Manager and from a command line. Next, a great deal of this chapter covered printer administration. Tasks covered include stopping and restarting the print service, enabling and disabling printing, configuring printer definitions, moving and canceling print jobs, and creating printer classes. The printing section ended with troubleshooting advice.

It's impossible to run Solaris without dealing with processes. Every running software component is related to at least one process in Solaris. Two common commands to view process information are ps and pgrep.

If a process is misbehaving, you will want to terminate the process. This is done with the kill and pkill commands. All processes run with a priority, which helps determine which processes get CPU time.

Finally, this chapter concluded with a discussion of scheduling processes. Processes can be scheduled to run once with the at command, or configured to run on a regular schedule with crontab files.