Liane Praza's Weblog

I'm excited enough to wake from my blogging slumber. I went into hibernation for Burning Man (my 5th year), and since then have been frantically getting ready to release smf(5) onto an often unsuspecting world. The October 2004 release of Solaris Express includes smf(5), and you can start to read about it not just in our informal blogs, but also in more and less formal places.

I started down the long road to useful developer documentation by writing a Service Developer Introduction, which will grow into a book as time goes on. For now, I hope it answers the basic questions on how to convert your init scripts to smf(5), to take advantage of some of the self-healing capabilities Solaris now includes. We'll be making improvements and adding material, so I'll post here when there are updates.

A bit of assurance, as it comes up a lot -- you don't need to convert existing rc scripts to smf(5). The vast majority will still work with no modifications. However, there are benefits to spending a few minutes with your startup shell script and a little bit of XML, so take a look at the developer intro.

Finally, a plug -- read our Quickstart to get a general idea of what's new in Solaris administration with smf(5). It is a great place to start exploring.