Service Management Facility (smf(5)) at OpenSolaris.org

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Community: Service Management Facility (smf(5))

OpenSolaris Community: Service Management Facility (smf(5))

Community Observers

Endorsed projects

Self-healing services are delivered and managed on Solaris with the Service Management Facility (smf(5)). smf(5) augments the existing init.d(4) and inetd(1M) startup mechanisms, promoting the service to a first-class operating system object.

Administrators can now:

view system-wide service status,
manage services, not just their individual processes,
access information about misconfigured/misbehaving services,
enable and disable services persistently across upgrades and patches,
delegate tasks to non-root users securely, and
more reliably access the console in repair scenarios.

smf(5) gives developers:

automated restart of services in dependency order due to administrative errors, software bugs, or uncorrectable hardware errors,
a single API for service management, configuration, and observation,
access to service-based resource management, and
simplified boot-process debugging.

This is the home base for the SMF community: users, system administrators, service authors, application developers, and SMF infrastructure contributors.

FAQ!

Check out the SMF FAQ (updated: 4/23/07)

Documents

Dive in and get started with the Solaris Service Management Facility - Quickstart Guide.
Learn to create your own smf(5) services in the Solaris Service Management Facility - Service Developer Introduction.
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/
Review the smf(5) ARC policy when delivering services for OpenSolaris.
Peruse smf(5) Design Documents.

Forums:

Articles and Papers:

Solaris Service Management Facility: Modern System Startup and Administration. from The USENIX 19th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA '05).
Peter Baer Galvin's smf(5) Sys Admin article
Glenn Brunette's Restricting Service Administration blueprint

Bugs:

Bugs with the keyword smf

Test Suite:

Sparc package
i386 package
SMF Test Suite source tarball
SMF Test Suite source browsable

Announcements

02 Jun 2008	SMF Test Suite
20 Oct 2005	scfdot - An SMF dependency graph generator

Blogs

dep - Ants should be telepathic

Jul 14, 1:45 PM

If they were, then when I kill one of the ants that appear in my bathroom, the rest would immediately realize that the ant's mission was one of folly. That only an ant expecting death should enter my ...

sch - 2008.05: Who's got it

May 23, 4:28 PM

Well, I don't know exactly who's running a copy of 2008.05 , but I do know what IP addresses have interacted with pkg.opensolaris.org from the server logs. I used MaxMind's GeoIP Lite to map these ...

dep - Visual Panels online help text now available

May 20, 5:48 PM

If you're using Visual Panels and are confused by a panel... it's a usability bug ( please let us know ). Normally we'd have online help to compensate for such inadequacies, but Java Help isn't ...

sch - Mail droppage

May 13, 11:57 AM

It looks like I missed making a configuration change last update, and opensolaris.org has been dropping my mail messages for the past week as a result. Sorry—if you're waiting for mail from me, you ...

dep - Visual Panels in OpenSolaris 2008.05

May 7, 1:19 AM

For a while I've been working on a project to ease OpenSolaris configuration called Visual Panels (with Steve and Tony , and a great deal of patience, insight, and fastidiously gathered data from ...