Objectives

Most computers these days have hard disks for data storage. On a Windows PC or Macintosh, this data is stored in the form of files and folders. Folders can contain both files and other folders, which provides a good way to organize the huge quantity of data that hard disks are now capable of holding. Solaris provides the same method of file management but folders are called “directories” and, unless you are using an X Windows front-end, you won't be seeing them as colorful icons.

In this chapter, we will be looking at how Solaris organizes the files and directories on the hard disk and how we can create and effectively manage filesystems.

Note that a Solaris server will contain at least one hard disk (depending on the model) and the number of disks will determine how you choose to make use of them. For simplicity we have assumed all our example systems have just a single hard disk (we will look at how to add a second disk to one of them in Chapter 17, “Adding SCSI Devices”). This ensures that everything we do to configure the disks on our systems can also be done on yours.