SMF: offline or disabled services

May 1, 2009 · Filed Under General Solaris topics 

When something doesn’t work like expected, one of the first commands to find what’s wrong is svcs -a. But there are other ways to use this command.

For instance, the following command will show only disabled and offline services, which quite often is exactly what we want. Particularly useful is the fact that such a variant of using svcs shows you impact of each offline service – you can quickly see what other things may not be working as the result of it.

solaris# svcs -xv
svc:/application/print/server:default (LP print server)
 State: disabled since Wed Jan 26 11:23:32 2005
Reason: Disabled by an administrator.
   See: http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-05
   See: man -M /usr/share/man -s 1M lpsched
Impact: 2 dependent services are not running:
        svc:/application/print/rfc1179:default
        svc:/application/print/ipp-listener:default
svc:/milestone/multi-user-server:default (multi-user plus exports milestone)
 State: offline since Wed Jan 26 11:54:58 2005
Reason: Start method is running.
   See: http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-C4
   See: man -M /usr/share/man -s 1M init
   See: /var/svc/log/milestone-multi-user-server:default.log
Impact: 1 dependent service is not running:
        svc:/system/zones:default

As you can see, offline service svc:/application/print/server:default renders two its dependants useless as well, namely they are svc:/application/print/rfc1179:default and svc:/application/print/ipp-listener:default.

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  • Susan

    so… why was multi-user-server offline? I’m having this problem now and trying to figure it out. If you have any input, please email me…

    • http://gleb.reys.net Gleb Reys

      Hi Susan,

      It’s usually a sign of one of the basic initialization routines not completing successfully. Try svcs -a and grep for anything that’s in maintenance mode.

      Gleb