Creating SMF services

This time, we are going to create a new service in Oracle Solaris 11, and the chosen application is gedit, which is a graphical editor. It is obvious that we can show the same procedure using any application and we will only need to make the necessary alterations to adapt the example.

Getting ready

This recipe requires a virtual machine (VirtualBox or VMware) with Oracle Solaris 11 installed and 4 GB RAM.

How to do it…

The first step is to create a script that starts and stops the application that we are interested in. There are several scripts in /lib/svc/method and we could use one of them as a template, but I have used a very basic model, as follows:

root@solaris11-1:~/chapter5# vi gedit_script.sh 
#!/sbin/sh
. /lib/svc/share/smf_include.sh
case "$1" in 
'start')
DISPLAY=:0.0
export DISPLAY
/usr/bin/gedit &
;;
'stop')
pkill -x -u 0 gedit
;;
*)
echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop}"
exit 1
;;

esac
exit $SMF_EXIT_OK

This script is simple and good, but we need to change its...