Orienting yourself on an unfamiliar Oracle Solaris 11.4 host coming from Linux

What it is

A short set of read-only commands establishes the ground truth before an agent changes anything: exact release, CPU/memory topology, and whether the current shell is inside the global zone or a non-global zone. On Oracle Solaris 11.4 these commands differ from their Linux namesakes in flags and output, and several everyday Linux habits do not transfer.

• uname -a prints the full identification string; uname -sr alone prints SunOS 5.11, the kernel name and release the whole Solaris 11 family reports — Solaris marketing version numbers and uname -r do not match; on 11.4, uname -v prints the kernel's update level instead (for example 11.4.1.4.0 after SRU 1).
• zonename prints only the name of the current zone; a bare global means the shell is in the global zone, anything else means a non-global (or kernel) zone with a narrower view of the system.
• psrinfo -v lists every virtual processor with its clock speed and start time; prtconf prints total memory and the device tree, the closest analogue to lspci/lshw.
• cat /etc/release names the release (for example Oracle Solaris 11.4) but not the Support Repository Update (SRU) level; pkg info entire (see the patching article in this series) reports the version of the entire incorporation, which identifies the exact SRU.

Why it matters

Solaris 11 is not "Unix that behaves like Linux": the shells, the package manager, the service manager, and the default tool locations all differ. Running Linux muscle-memory commands (systemctl, apt, ip addr) fails outright, and guessing a similarly-named Solaris command without checking its actual flags risks acting on the wrong target.

How to apply

• Start every session with uname -a, zonename, psrinfo -v and prtconf | head, and log the output so later diagnosis has a baseline.
• Expect bash as the default login shell for ordinary users, ksh (ksh93) for root, and /bin/sh (/usr/bin/sh) to be ksh93; the legacy Bourne shell survives as /usr/sunos/bin/sh, and ksh88 as /usr/sunos/bin/ksh only if the shell/ksh88 package is installed.
• Know that GNU userland tools ship under /usr/gnu/bin, which is not in the default PATH (/usr/bin for users, /usr/bin:/usr/sbin for the root role and for bash); the native /usr/bin tools can accept different flags for the same job, so --long-options that work on Linux may not exist on the /usr/bin version of a command.
• If a script must behave identically to its GNU counterpart, call the binary under /usr/gnu/bin explicitly or put /usr/gnu/bin before /usr/bin in PATH, as the release notes advise; /usr/ccs/bin is now a symlink to /usr/bin, so an old PATH listing it before /usr/gnu/bin finds the native tools first.

Pitfalls

• Assuming pkg behaves like apt/yum: it manages boot environments, not just files (see the IPS and boot-environment articles in this series).
• Misreading uname inside a zone: a solaris-brand non-global zone shares and reports the global zone's kernel, while a kernel zone (solaris-kz) reports its own kernel and update level; run zonename first.
• Assuming sudo is the native elevation path: roles and pfexec are (see the RBAC article in this series); sudo is often installed, but whether it is configured for your user varies per host.