Management of Systems and Services Made Simple With the Oracle Solaris Service Management Facility: Best Practices for Oracle Solaris 10 in the Datacenter

Older UNIX operating systems, such as Oracle Solaris 8 and Oracle Solaris 9, include a set of services - a set of individual applications that execute as a single process - that start at boot time and continue to execute while the system is up and running. These processes handle network, file system, security, device, print, cron, and other system services, fielding requests received. System services start sequentially, with some dependent on the availability of other running services in order to start. If a service requires another service that fails to start, the dependent service cannot start and the environment might fail to run completely.