Liane Praza's Weblog

Wednesday January 19, 2005

Getting around within the core

Ok, so maybe the title reference is a little stretched by now, but anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Now that you've got a map to the center of boot (-m milestone=none), you may want to be able to get around, visit the library, fight some of those antediluvian monsters, the usual.

First, if you've a recent-enough version of Solaris 10, you'll have a copy of /lib/svc/share/README. It appeared around December, so you may need to wait for the final version of S10 to see it. In any case, it is pointed out to the unfortunates who get dropped to the administrative maintenance prompt during boot because something went wrong. Those who went to a restricted milestone like milestone=none by actions of their own fingers aren't told explicitly about the file.

Most helpfully, that file gives you instructions on how to get to the network, if your system drops to maintenance and you need to retrieve some binary to replace a bad one. This happens to those of us who develop things in the boot path quite a bit.

If you really just need to change some service configuration, if you've got a single filesystem for / and /usr, you can (usually) run

   mount -o remount,rw / 

Then, you'll be able to disable services, run svccfg(1M), etc. at will. If you have a separate /usr mountpoint, you'll need to run the methods described in the README.

Oh, and apologies for overloading the term "core". I promise I'll find a new metaphor rather than beating this dead one any more.