Solaris 10. Just out of interest, is anyone having issues with smf(5)? I mean it seems so convoluted, it's taking me ages to figure out what it does and how it does it. They've taken a simple idea of starting a deamon and turned it into something that you can fiddle around for a whole day :-/
Yes, but spending that first day is well worth it. SMF is oddly close to Dan Bernstein's daemontools package [1], which I've used for several years. It's strange at first, but having a system that will automatically monitor your daemons is a good thing. Once you get used to the svcadm and svcs commands it's pretty easy to quickly monitor the status of a daemon, and even administrate its operation. I also like the ability to assign SMF management roles to certain people, without having to give them root access. Don't forget the architects of SMF keep pretty informative blogs that can help someone getting started [2].
My only serious gripe to date is the lack of manifest and method files for the more common daemons. They're not hard to write, but the common apps available on sunfreeware.com for Solaris 10 don't seem to include them yet. I imagine with time this problem will fix itself.
-Sam
[1] http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html
[2] http://blogs.sun.com/sch http://blogs.sun.com/tobin/
Thanks for the links, I have to say the biggest problem I'm having is not monitoring services, but adding my own services. I just wish they had complete examples showing how to do it from start to finish. Also they need to document the format of manifest files, i.e. the syntax and what different fields do and how. The last thing I want to do is deciphering XML DTDs. I just hope this will be ready when they officially launch Solaris 10.
_______________________________________________
Solaris-Users mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/solaris-users
