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Chapter 12

Managing Serial Ports With the Service Access Facility (Tasks)

This chapter describes how to manage serial port services with the Service Access Facility (SAF).

This is a list of the step-by-step instructions in this chapter.

This is a list of the overview information in this chapter.

For reference information about the SAF, see Service Access Facility Administration (Reference).

Using the Service Access Facility

You can set up terminals and modems with the Solaris Management Console's Serial Ports Tool, Admintool, or the SAF commands.

The SAF is the tool that is used to administer terminals, modems, and other network devices. The top-level SAF program is the Service Access Controller (SAC). The SAC controls port monitors that you administer through the sacadm command. Each port monitor can manage one or more ports.

You administer the services associated with ports through the pmadm command. While services provided through SAC can differ from network to network, the SAC and its administrative commands, sacadm and pmadm, are network independent.

The following table describes the SAF control hierarchy. The sacadm command is used to administer the SAC, which controls the ttymon and listen port monitors.

The services of ttymon and listen are in turn controlled by the pmadm command. One instance of ttymon can service multiple ports. One instance of listen can provide multiple services on a network interface.

Table 12-1 SAF Control Hierarchy

Function	Program	Description
Overall Administration	`sacadm`	Command for adding and removing port monitors
Service Access Controller	`sac`	SAF's master program
Port Monitors	`ttymon` `listen`	Monitors serial port login requests Monitors requests for network services
Port Monitor Service Administrator	`pmadm`	Command for controlling port monitors services
Services	logins, remote procedure calls, other	Services to which the SAF provides access
Console Administration	console login	The console is automatically set up with an entry in the `/etc/inittab` file that uses `ttymon`-express mode. Do not use the `pmadm` or `sacadm` to manage the console directly. For more information, see `ttymon` and the Console Port.

Overall SAF Administration (`sacadm`)

The sacadm command is the top level of the SAF. The sacadm command primarily is used to add and remove port monitors such as ttymon and listen. Other sacadm functions include listing the current status of port monitors and administering port monitor configuration scripts.

Service Access Controller (SAC Program)

The Service Access Controller program (SAC) oversees all port monitors. A system automatically starts SAC upon entering multiuser mode.

When the SAC is invoked, it first looks for, and interprets, each system's configuration script. You can use configuration script to customizes the SAC environment. This script is empty by default. The modifications made to the SAC environment are inherited by all the "children" of the SAC. This inherited environment might be modified by the children.

After the SAC has interpreted the per-system configuration script, the SAC program reads its administrative file and starts the specified port monitors. For each port monitor, SAC runs a copy of itself, forking a child process. Each child then interprets its per-port monitor configuration script, if such a script exists.

Any modifications to the environment specified in the per-port monitor configuration script affect the port monitor and will be inherited by all its children. Finally, the child process runs the port monitor program by using the command found in the SAC administrative file.

SAC Initialization Process

The following steps summarize what happens when SAC is first started: