Jordan Brown (Sun) wrote: > When we tell an administrator "you can configure the system to boot to > milestone/multi-user-server", what do we tell them about what that > *means*? What services should the SA expect to be running when the > system is at m-u-s?
This is a long-winded answer, which may turn out not to be the answer you seek at all. I have never had to boot into m-u-s to do something useful. It's invariably some demo about milestones where I use this. This is not to say it's not useful, I just have not had the occasion to use it. On the other hand, I've booted into "none" many times, poked around to fix stuff, restart stuff, and then boot back to "all". This is very useful. Before SMF, I don't recall booting into 3 a lot either. A system on the fritz will throw me into single-user, ask for the maintenance password. I poke around, fix stuff, exit. Now to what can I expect in S, 2, 3? Well, the stuff in rcS.d, rc2.d, rc3.d would have run, naturally. :) Ok, that's just being flip. Who determines what goes in those dirs? Sun, usually, and the admin, who inserts stuff into S69inet for routes, ndd, and everything semi-important into S99blah. I don't think there is common agreement on what one should expect in m-u-s, other than stuff in rc3.d should be started. > If m-u-s is equivalent to init level 3, then the answer is "all of > them", which would suggest that m-u-s should depend on all services. But > then again, that's what "all" means, so what's the intended distinction > between m-u-s and "all"? I asked question and got an answer here: http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/smf-discuss/2006-March/004573.html > Perhaps m-u-s was a mistake, and init level 3 should be equivalent to > "all", to avoid that gray area. I think of the milestones as drivers for the left-over rc services. If you look in /var/svc/manifest/milestone, there's no all.xml. So it falls to m-u-s to have a method to drive rc3.d/* scripts. I was very confused until I stopped thinking about milestones and run levels as analogous representation in different systems. I think you are asking a philosophical question, what are some finite states a box should be in and what can I expect in each state? In my perfect world, it would be "no service", "all services", "maintenance mode" which is defined by the vendor and by me. But we have this compatibility issue like Liane said. CT
