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WHY SMF in Solaris 10

1. Booting of system made fast by starting independed process paralley unlike in solaris 9

process are started one after other which elapsed the boot tim

2. Automatic Service restarting. In solaris 9 we need to manually start service and all it

dependencies whereas in Solaris 10 interdependencies are started automatically which

make administration easy

3. In Solaris 10 all services are managed by svcs command whereas in solaris 9 need to find out

from where we need to start the services.

4. SMF is a core part of the predictive self-healing technology available in the Solaris 10 OS, and itprovides automatic recovery from software and hardware failures as well as administrative errors

5. In addition, SMF-managed services can be delegated to non-root users. Finally, SMF is a follow-on tothe legacy method of starting and stopping services, though /etc/rc scripts will continue to run when

present for backward compatibility.6.

Solaris Service ManagerThis function unifies service control by managing the interdependency between services and theirstartup sequence

Solaris Service Manager unifies service control by managing the interdependency between services,ensuring that they are started (or restarted following service failure) in the appropriate order

The automation of startup and restart services leaves system administrators free to concentrate onother work.

Swift system startupSolaris Service Manager shrinks service startup time by starting independent services in parallel.

With Solaris 9, services are started one by one following a service start script. This startup method issimple and adequate when handling small-scale systems.

However, with UNIX servers being used for more and more large-scale systems with many moreservices, it takes a long time to start them all in sequence.

Now with Solaris 10, non-dependent services are started in parallel based on a stored servicesrelationship configuration. This new feature enables much quicker system startup and recovery,leading to greater business continuity and service availability.

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Automatic service restarting

With Solaris 9 OS, service management required a detailed knowledge of services. If a service failed,the system administrator had to not only restart the failed service, but all other services that servicedepended on. Such careful operation had to be undertaken manually and required the administratorto have an intimate knowledge of the service dependencies.

With Solaris10, the system administrator no longer needs to know the interdependency of services.Solaris Service Manager holds the service interdependencies allowing it to automatically restart allnecessary services without administrator intervention.

Solaris Service Manager constantly watches server status and automatically restarts any failedservice.

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Service management details

svcs(1) command

System administrators can more easily monitor services using Solaris Service Manager's servicestatus information and service activation/deactivation interfaces based on the commands (svcs(1),svcadm(1) etc). Until Solaris 9, it was a complicated procedure to understand service status. Servicelevel information was not provided and system administrators have to assume service status fromtheir own analysis of kernel level information. A slow and error prone process.

svcadm(1M) command

Services and the services on which they depend are started in their appropriate order using theSolaris Service Manager svcadm(1) command. System administrators are longer required to run

complicated service startup operations.For example, if there are two services, Service A and Service B, and Service A depends on ServiceB, previously the system administrator needed to start the services paying close attention to theirdependent relationship. Now with Solaris10, they only have to start Service A. Solaris ServiceManager automatically detects that Service B needs to be started, and starts the services in the rightsequence.

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With Solaris 10 the traditional service stop procedure using the kill(1) or pkill(1) commands is nolonger available. This is because, once stopped, Solaris Service Manager will automatically restartthem. So a new command, svcadm (1M) is now used for stopping services.

References

Solaris 9 or earlier versions Solaris 10

Service statusps(1) command

(only process information is shown)svcs(1) or ps(1) command

Service stop # /etc/init.d/cron stop# svcadm disable -t

system/cron:default

Service restart (temporary) # /etc/init.d cron start# svcadm enable -t

system/cron:default

Service stop

After service restart the service isn't started

(1)# /etc/init.d/cron stop

(2)# mv /etc/rc2.d/S75cron /etc/rc2.d/_S75cron

(Need to rename the service start script)

# svcadm disable -t

system/cron:default

Service restart (permanent)(1) # /etc/init.d/cron stop

(2) # /etc/init.d/cron start

# svcadm restart -t

system/cron:default