SMF is one of the new features in Solaris 10, and provides the infrastructure needed to start and stop all of the processes that make up a useful system. SMF maintains a repository to store a variety of meta data to describe a service, and this information includes the state of a given service. The state of a service can be enabled if the service is supposed to start when the system boots, or disabled if the service isn’t supposed to start when the system boots. I am a big fan of disabling every service that isn’t needed to make the server perform it’s function, and this is one area where I think SMF shines. Once I get all of the services on a Solaris 10 host configured the way I want them, I use the svccfg “extract” option to dump the service information to a site manifest:
$ svccfg extract > site.xml
After I create this manifest, I use the svccfg “apply” option to apply it to other servers:
$ <strong>svccfg apply site.xml<strong>
This is rather useful, and sure beats creating a script to do a bunch of mv SXXX to sXXXX. Nice!