[SunHELP] questions about new SMF services

[Tom Lieuallen]

I have several questions about SMF services in solaris 10.  We've been at 10 
for a while and I've setup a handful of SMF services for various things such as 
apache, samba (local compile), flexlm, etc.  It seems to be working for the 
most part.  However, we've encountered several problems.

apache 1 on a T2000 would dump core and keep restarting on us (a matter of 
hours or days).  However, when we'd disable it in SMF and ran it manually, not 
a problem.  We went back to the old boring init.d startup for it and not a peep 
out of it.

samba has been acting up as well.  Same sort of thing; dumped core on us for a 
while with SMF.  We haven't given up on SMF for it yet (or seen if it was more 
stable when started otherwise), but its day is coming.  :-(

Finally, twice we've had a SMF instance of samba go out to lunch.  The samba 
processes were killed or died and SMF didn't know about it.  It thought samba 
was still online.  We couldn't do anything with it.  I ended up removing the 
service with svccfg delete.  Even that didn't make svc/SMF (svc.startd, I 
think) give up.  We had to end up rebooting.

This is the stop definition.

         <exec_method
                 type='method'
                 name='stop'
                 exec=':kill'
                 timeout_seconds='60'>
         </exec_method>

I realize there just isn't anything to go on with this, so the real question is 
whether there are tricks out there or whether there are certain things that 
just don't play well with SMF.

thank you

Tom Lieuallen
Oregon State University