2009-08-18 12:37:00
As we all know BoKS is available for a multitude of flavors of Unix. Aside from a number of Linux distributions, it also runs on AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and even on Windows. Because of this diverse choice of platforms FoxT is of course forced to make design choices that point towards the lowest common denominator.
In some cases these design choices lead to undesirable situations, which one will need to work around. One such case is Solaris 10, which chooses to forgo the ancient Unix staple of /etc/inetd.conf, /etc/init.d/, /etc/rc?.d/ and /etc/inittab. Instead, Sun Microsystems has chosen to create their own service management facility, aptly called Solaris SMF.
In Solaris 10 the SMF software is used to manage the startup and shutdown sequences of the server, as well as the current state of many running applications. For example, where one would originally type "/etc/init.d/openssh start" one now enters "svcadm enable svc:/network/service:ssh".
BoKS however still relies on the old fashioned scripts for its startup and shutdown as it can expect to find these on all Unixen. However, during the execution of one of our projects Unixerius have decided to make a patch for BoKS that will allow the software to work reliably from SMF.
In order to get BoKS to work with SMF we'll need to make a number of changes to both BoKS and the Solaris operating system. We are currently not aiming for a full switch from /etc/rc3.d and boksinit to SMF, but instead opt to only include the minimum into SMF.
The way we see it, we'll need to make the following changes:
*: And boksinit.replica and boksinit.master.
The above should allow us to stop and start BoKS independently of the BoKS SSH daemon. If you wouldn't do this SMF would kill boks_sshd along with the rest of BoKS. It will also allow us to use "Boot -k" and "Boot", which will then interact with SMF instead of just killing PIDs from a list.
Please give us a few weeks to work out this patch. Of course we'll post news both over here and on the Unixerius website once the work is done.
kilala.nl tags: sysadmin, boks,
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