Chapter 4: Managing File Systems

Overview

Files are an important resource supported by an operating system. The way an operating system organizes files on a medium is called a file system. One of your tasks as a Solaris system administrator will be managing the file systems supported by Solaris. There are a number of file system types reflecting the media (e.g., disk or memory) on which the files can be stored and the various ways of accessing the stored files (e.g., locally or remotely over a network). Once the data has been stored in files, it is important to keep the data consistent. Therefore, handling file system inconsistencies is one of the important tasks that we will explore in this chapter. The disk spaces that hold most of the data systems need to be managed, and you will see that Solaris offers commands to manage disk space usage at various levels of detail. To avoid exposing the files directly to the users, you can create links to the files that look like and work exactly like files from a user's perspectives. In addition, we will explore link management.

The central issue to think about in this chapter is: how are the file systems managed on a Solaris 10 system? To understand this we will explore three thought streams: understanding file systems and dealing with their inconsistencies, managing disk space usage, and managing links to avoid direct exposure of files to users.