lianep at eng.sun.com wrote: > John Cecere writes: > >>Can anyone point me to *the* manual on SMF that's not just a collection of ma >>n pages ? I tried searching SMF and Service Management >>Facility on docs.sun.com and came up basically empty. > > > The third link that I get after going to docs.sun.com and typing "SMF" > into the search box is this: > > http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-2379?q=smf > > Which has 2 chapters on SMF services: 14, and 15, as Nita mentioned. > I seem to recall that the search interface pointed you at the useful > chapters, but it doesn't seem to do that anymore. Would it have been > more helpful if those 2 chapters had "SMF" in the title?
Yes, absolutely. > > >>The link at the bottom >>of the BigAdmin article: >> >>http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/sdev_intro.html >> >>Has a link titled *SMF System Administration Guide Documentation* but this li >>nk points to a doc in docs.sun.com called *Shut Down >>and Boot Terminology*. > > > Yeah, it'd be nice to have links into the docs.sun.com content that > persisted across document changes. That'd also allow us to link to the > appropriate place in the docs.sun.com books from services. But, we > still don't have that. > > I wonder if any of the efforts going on in the docs community of > OpenSolaris offers a solution... > > In the meantime, I'll try to get the link in that document fixed... but > can't promise it'll work for more than whenever the next doc update gets > pushed. (Maybe I'll take the link out and just refer to the chapter > names.) > > >>A comprehensive doc explaining all facets of SMF would be nice. Especially on >>e that explains what you can do with all the property >>values. > > > Property values can be, and are restarter and service-specific. The > stable (in terms of any real ARC commitment level) properties should > be documented in the appropriate manpages, but they're necessarily spread > across the restarter manpage plus the service manpage. We obviously won't > be documenting non-stable interfaces. This is my point. There is no single document that has a compiled list of these things. Man pages are ok, but they tend to be fairly dry in their explanation of things and tend not to go into too much detail on specifics. They are meant merely as a reference, not an explanation of how something works. Also, man pages + docs.sun.com = two sources of documentation for pieces of the same thing. > > The templates project will let us document the properties in-place. > That is, we'll be able to have a description of each stable property > actually stored in the repository. This would be good as long as the information stored was more comprehensive than a man page. > > Would a command which allowed you to query the repository for the > stable properties on a service/instance, along with their descriptions > help? Yes. > > Or, are you looking for documentation of a subset of the properties -- > ones that have global or restarter scope rather than service-local > scope? If so, we can probably document that for restarters we ship in > Solaris. This sounds good too. I like having the information close to the source. > > We don't ship all restarters nor all services in Solaris, so any list that > we shipped with Solaris/OpenSolaris can't be as comprehensive as you > request. For example, the Sun Cluster one would be much longer since > they have their own restarter and own set of services. I don't understand why not. The Sun Cluster specific stuff could just be in a separate section, as could all of the add-on stuff to Solaris. Thanks, John -- John Cecere Sun Microsystems 732-302-3922 / john.cecere at sun.com
