System Administration Guide: Advanced Administration

Using the Service Access Facility

You can set up terminals and modems with the Solaris Management Console's Serial Ports Tool, admintool, or the SAF commands.

The SAF is the tool used for administering terminals, modems, and other network devices. The top-level SAF program is the Service Access Controller (SAC). The SAC controls port monitors which you administer through the sacadm command. Each port monitor can manage one or more ports.

You administer the services associated with ports through the pmadm command. While services provided through SAC can differ from network to network, the SAC and its administrative commands, sacadm and pmadm, are network independent.

The following table describes the SAF control hierarchy. The sacadm command is used to administer the SAC which controls the ttymon and listen port monitors.

The services of ttymon and listen are in turn controlled by the pmadm command. One instance of ttymon can service multiple ports and one instance of listen can provide multiple services on a network interface.

Table 12–1 SAF Control Hierarchy


Function	Program	Description
Overall Administration	`sacadm`	Command for adding and removing port monitors
Service Access Controller	`sac`	SAF's master program
Port Monitors	`ttymon` `listen`	Monitors serial port login requests Monitors requests for network services
Port Monitor Service Administrator	`pmadm`	Command for controlling port monitors services
Services	logins; remote procedure calls; other	Services to which SAF provides access
Console Administration	console login	The console is automatically set up via an entry in the `/etc/inittab` file using `ttymon`-express mode. Do not use the `pmadm` or `sacadm` to manage the console directly. For more information, see `ttymon` and the Console Port.