Perhaps an SMF expert can shed some light into the following svc.startd behavior:
A system is running NWAM, and therefore the network/physical:nwam service is enabled, and the nwamd daemon is running. The nwamd daemon configures a network interface by exec'ing "ifconfig <intf> dhcp start", which causes ifconfig to in turn exec dhcpagent. At some point later, dhcpagent dies a horrible death by way of SIGSEGV and dumps core due to a bug (obviously). At this point, svc.startd somehow notices the dhcpagent crash and for some reason decides that the system would be better off if the network/physical:nwam service were restarted. It prints the following anonymous message in /var/svc/log/network-physical:nwam.log: "Stopping because process dumped core." (It would be nice if svc.startd were a bit more specific in that log message, but that's not the core issue.) It proceeds to stop and start network/physical:nwam. Why does it do this? Is nwamd not to be trusted to notice that it's unable to acquire a DHCP lease on this interface and deal with this on its own? nwamd is likely capable of noticing that something went wrong with the network interface it was responsible for and to either retry to acquire a lease, or try on another network interface. Even if it's not, it's not inconceivable that it could be. -Seb
