Solaris Service Manager

Introduced in the Solaris Express 10/04 release and enhanced in the Solaris 10 3/05 release, the Solaris Service Manager provides an infrastructure that augments the traditional UNIX startup scripts, init run levels, and configuration files. This infrastructure provides the following functions:

• Automatically restarts failed services in dependency order, whether the services failed as the result of administrator error, a software bug, or an uncorrectable hardware error.

• Makes services objects that can be viewed, with the new svcs command, and managed, with svcadm and svccfg commands. You can also view the relationships between services and processes by using svcs -p, for both SMF services and legacy init.d scripts.

• Makes it easy to back up, restore, and undo changes to services by taking automatic snapshots of service configurations.

• Makes it easy to debug. You can ask questions about services and receive an explanation of why a service isn't running by using svcs -x. Also, this process is eased by individual and persistent log files for each service.

• Enhances the ability of administrators to securely delegate tasks to nonroot users, including the ability to modify properties and start, stop, or restart services on the system.

• Boots faster on large systems by starting services in parallel according to the dependencies of the services. The opposite process occurs during shutdown.

• Enables you to customize the boot console output either to be as quiet as possible, which is the default, or to be verbose by using boot -m verbose.

• Preserves compatibility with existing administrative practices wherever possible. For example, most customer and ISV-supplied rc scripts still work as usual.

• Enables you to configure your system services in one of two modes, both represented as smf(5) profiles. The “generic_open.xml” profile enables all the traditional Internet services that were previously enabled by default in the Solaris OS. The “generic_limited_net.xml” profile disables a large number of services that are frequently disabled during the process of hardening a system. However, this profile is not a replacement for the Solaris Security Toolkit (JASS) tool. See the individual profiles for details.

See Chapter 9, “Managing Services (Overview),” in the System Administration Guide: Basic Administration for more information about this infrastructure. An overview of the infrastructure can be found in the smf(5) man page.