SMF and jumpstart

SMF is Sun's Service Management Facility, and is their method of controlling startup and shutdown, enabling and disabling, and dependencies of services. Traditionally in Solaris and UNIX this was done with inetd and RC scripts. Here are some links:

• Good overview: http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/smf-quickstart.jsp
• The more detailed Sun Admin guide on SMF: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-1985/hbrunlevels-25516?a=view

Unfortunately with most "how-to" on SMF they just talk about how to use svcs of svcadm to quickly show you information, or start and stop services. What I wanted, however, was to find out which file(s) this information was stored in, so that I could set it up on a server without using the commands (specifically set it in the "finish" script of jumpstart)

Turns out it this can be done with a service manifest / site.xml file, as shown in these posts:

• http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=695&tstart=0
• http://forums.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5382608&tstart=3
• http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/sdev_intro.jsp