SMF Service Management Facility

SMF

Stands for Service Management Facility a new way of managing services in your Solaris Operating Environment.

Benefits:

• You can manually stop,start and restart services using proper procedures.
• You can establish and formalize dependency relationships between services.
• You can have a grip on system startup behavior and service status.
• You can have a structured mechanism for Fault Management of system services.
• You can get detailed information about misconfigured services with explaination as why the service was not running or misconfigured.
• You get individual log files for each service.

KEY TERM:

Service Identifier

Service Category

Service States

Milestones

Service Configuration Repository

Now we shall discuss the key terms now to get familiar with SMF

What is Service Identifier ?

Each instance of   service within SMF has a name which is called Service Identifier.

Service Identifier is in the form of  Fault Management Resource Identifier.

What is FMRI ?

FMRI indicates type of service or category,name and instance of the service.

What is Service Category ?

It defines the category of  service and is always after the prefix “svc”.

Example:

application,device,legacy,milestone,network,platform,site,system.

What is Service States?

It denotes if a SMF service is online, offline, disabled, maintenance, uninitialized, degraded, legacy_run.

What are Milestones ?

It’s a special type of service that is made up of a defined set of  other services.

A milestone is a system state to reach which in turn requires defined set of services to be running which depend on other services being available.

Example:

single-user,multi-user,multi-user-server,network,name-services,sysconfig,devices.

What is Service Configuration Repository ?

It stores information about the state of each SMF service instance.

It also stores configuration information about the services and system.

Example:

/etc/svc/repository.db

Introducing SMF Commands

svcs

You can identify each service by using svcs command.

Example:

#svcs

Using svcs command to list service, check service dependencies.

#svcs -a | grep offline

#svcs -a | grep disabled

#svcs nfs/client

STATE          STIME    FMRI

maintenance     3:02:10 svc:/network/nfs/client:default

# svcs -D nfs/client 

(Use D to list services or service intances that depend on given services or service instances).

STATE          STIME    FMRI

online         Mar_13   svc:/system/filesystem/autofs:default

online         Mar_13   svc:/system/dumpadm:default

online         Mar_13   svc:/milestone/multi-user:default

online         Mar_13   svc:/system/webconsole:consol

#svcs –d network/smtp

(Use d to list services or service instances upon which the given service instances depend).

STATE          STIME    FMRI

online         Mar_13   svc:/milestone/name-services:default

online         Mar_13   svc:/system/identity:domain

online         Mar_13   svc:/network/service:default

online         Mar_13   svc:/system/filesystem/local:default

online         Mar_13   svc:/system/filesystem/autofs:default

online         Mar_13   svc:/system/system-log:default

#svcs -xv (x Displays explanations for service states,v displays verbose )

Example:

# svcs -xv

svc:/application/print/server:default (LP print server)

 State: disabled since Sun Mar 13 20:44:59 2011

Reason: Disabled by an administrator.

   See: http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-05

   See: man -M /usr/share/man -s 1M lpsched

Impact: 2 dependent services are not running:

        svc:/application/print/rfc1179:default

        svc:/application/print/ipp-listener:default

svcadm

You can administer or change the service by using svcadm command.

Example:

#svcadm enable sendmail (use this if its disabled)

#svcadm disable sendmail(use this to disabled if enabled)

Example:

#svcadm clear sendmail    (use this if in maintenance state)

#svcadm refresh sendmail (use this after clear)

#svcadm restart sendmail  (use this after refresh)

svccfg

You can configure and manipulate a service by using the svccfg command.

Example 1 : Importing a Service Description

The following example imports a service description for the seismic service in the XML manifest specified on the command line.

# svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/site/seismic.xml

 Example 2 : Exporting a Service Description

 To export a service description on the local system:

 $ svccfg export dumpadm >/tmp/dump.xml

 Example 3 :  Deleting a Service Instance

To delete a service instance:

$ svccfg delete network/inetd-upgrade:default

Example 4:  Modifying the properties of instance

# svccfg

       svc:> repository /etc/svc/repository-boot

       svc:> select telnet:default

       svc:/network/telnet:default> listprop general/enabled

       general/enabled  boolean  false

       svc:/network/telnet:default> exit

Example 5 : Reverting to another SMF snapshot that worked perfectly

# svccfg

svc:> select svc:/network/nfs/client:default

svc:/network/nfs/client:default> listsnap

initial

last-import

running

start

previous

svc:/network/nfs/client:default> revert start

svc:/network/nfs/client:default> quit

Now need to refresh and restart for changes to reflect.

-bash-3.00# svcadm refresh svc:/network/nfs/client:default

-bash-3.00# svcadm restart svc:/network/nfs/client:default

svcprop

You can retrieve values of service configuration properties

Example:

#svcprop -p restarter/state system/cron:default

  online