Understanding the sysconfig utility in Solaris 11 By Devan

Understanding the sysconfig utility in Solaris 11

The sysconfig utility is used in Oracle Solaris 11 to unconfigure and reconfigure an existing Oracle Solaris 11 system or its subsystem. The subsystems of a system that is configurable are referred to as “functional groupings”. A functional grouping is a service or collection of services that are configured or unconfigured when the utility is executed.

The sysconfig utility replaces the sysunconfig and sysidtool utilities. The sysconfig utility launches the System Configuration tool. You use the System Configuration tool to interactively unconfigure and configure the OS image.

You can perform the following three operations by using the sysconfig utility:

• Unconfiguration of the system: Brings the OS image to a pristine (unconfigured) state
• Configuration of the system: Enables you to reconfigure the OS image. It helps you to change the hostname, IP address, name service, time zone, initial user account, and root password.
• System configuration profile creation: Helps you to create a system configuration profile. The system configuration profile is an XML-based file that contains the hostname, IP address, name service, time zone, initial user account, and root password configuration properties. The system configuration profile can be used with the sysconfig configure command or with Automatic Installation (AI) to configure an OS image.

Apart from using sysconfig to perform system configurations, you can also reconfigure and unconfigure individual functional groups. The functional groupings that can be configured on a system are date_time, network, naming_services, location, users, identity, support, and keyboard. The system grouping will configure or unconfigure all functional groupings. Groupings can also be unconfigured and left in an unconfigured state.

The following command reconfigures the network and naming services functional groupings. The SCI Tool is invoked and the groupings will be reconfigured interactively.

# sysconfig configure -g network,naming_services

The following sequence of commands creates a profile for the network and naming services, and then use the profile to reconfigure the groupings non-interactively:

# sysconfig create-profile -g network,naming_services -o
/var/tmp/sysconfig_dir/

# sysconfig configure -g network,naming_services -c
/var/tmp/sysconfig_dir/sc_profile.xml