Solaris Services Administration Tool: SMF Getting Started Guide

In the past, the UNIX operating system contained a set of services, which were software programs that were not associated with any interactive user logon, used to listen and respond to requests for specific tasks such as sending e-mail messages, responding to FTP requests, or allowing remote commands to be executed. These traditional services are usually separate applications that execute as a single process, start when the system boots, and continue to execute at system startup and runtime to handle any requests received.

Today, administrators must manage a range of services that are beyond the scope of this original model. Sun has introduced service Management facility (SMF, service management tools) to simplify the management of these system services. SMF is a new feature of the Solaris operating system that creates a supported, unified model for service and service management on each Solaris system. It is a central part of the predictive self-healing technology in Solaris 10, providing automatic recovery for software and hardware failures and management errors.

In this guide, we will describe the features and advantages of SMF, identify the significantly updated parts of Solaris, and explain how to use SMF to accomplish typical administrative tasks. Detailed guidance on the SMF and predictive self-healing features can be found on Sun's bigadmin Web site.

Function

Service Management facility has improved several aspects of the Solaris management model. Some of the most notable updates include:

The service is represented by a class of objects that can be viewed (using the new Svcs (1) command) and managed (using Svcadm (1M) and Svccfg (1M)).

Regardless of whether the failed service is caused by an administrator error, a software error, or a hardware error that cannot be corrected, these services are automatically restarted in the order of relevance.

You can get detailed information about the services that have misconfigured or behavioral exceptions, including a description of why the service is not running (using "svcs-x"), and a separate persistence log file for each service.

Problems that occur during booting are easier to debug because you can control the level of boot verbosity, log service startup messages, and provide more reliable console access during startup failures.

Auto-shoot service configuration snapshots make it easier to back up, recover, and undo changes to services.

You can use the supported tools (Svcadm (1M)) to enable and disable services so that changes are not affected by upgrades and hotfixes and are left intact.

Administrators can more easily delegate tasks securely to non-superuser users, which include configuring, starting, stopping, or restarting services (as described in the smf_security (5) man page).

Starting the service in parallel, based on the relevance of the service, can lead to large systems faster.

Despite these changes, the compatibility with existing management practices has been preserved to the maximum extent possible. For example, most site-local "RC" scripts and ISV-supplied "RC" scripts will still work.

Significant changes

Most of the new functionality provided by SMF works in the background or is accessed through new commands, but some changes are still displayed quickly. Some of these changes are shown below.

In earlier versions of Solaris, large amounts of output were printed to the system console during boot time. Although these messages are more deeply elaborated on what happened, they are not very useful in some ways. A few services may print messages indicating that they are online, while many other services do not print messages. Some failure modes may also print some messages (such as "warning:timed out waiting for NIS to come Up"), and these messages do not help diagnose the underlying problem. Error messages are sometimes printed directly to the console, but are not displayed in any log.

The message that is displayed during the boot process is now streamlined a lot. The following is an example of what the computer displays when booting under SMF:

SunOS release 5.10 Version Generic 64-bit

Copyright 1983-2004 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Use are subject to license terms.

Hostname:demobox

NIS Domain name is testlab.example.com

Checking UFS filesystems

Demobox Console Login: