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.