Enhanced SMF Profiles

Material

• Status [below]
• Introduction [below]
• Phase 1 Design
• Long-term Design [PDF]

Status

As of 2009/04/14, this project is on hold due to staffing.  Some concepts discussed here are likely to be pursued, but possibly not in the precise form described here.

Introduction

Motivation

Users would benefit from and upcoming projects will require the ability to
change configuration data for multiple services in the service configuration
facility (SCF, a.k.a. the SMF repository) from a file, all at once.  Since these
changes should be upgradable (i.e., changes to the file should be propagated)
and users will want to undo these changes, the repository
must be extended.

Conceptual direction

It seems that an appropriate base concept for this change is the organization
of service configuration properties into profiles.  To
illustrate, consider the general/enabled property of the system/cron:default
and network/telnet:default services:


This is the state after a Solaris 10 system has booted for the first time and
the administrator has disabled the telnet service.  The services were created
as disabled, were then enabled by the generic_open.xml profile, but then
telnet was disabled as mentioned.  No record of what changes were
made when were retained, so undo or upgrade (of generic_open.xml, in this
example) is not generally feasible.

Suppose we allowed properties to specified in layered profiles:


Here the base profile represents the default properties of the services,
the property changes prescribed by the generic_open.xml file have been
overlayed in a generic_open profile, and local administrative changes
(svcadm disable telnet, in this case) have been overlayed in the local
profile.  To clients, only the top-most value is seen, which results in the
same effect as the first diagram.  In this situation, though, each profile
may be removed or upgraded independently.

This project will flesh out the necessary concepts and implement the requisite
changes to the repository and associated SMF tools.

Discussion

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