admin confusion and sma on OpenSolaris

When coming from a Linux world to OpenSolaris, there’s a wee bit of retraining required. The latest example I came across is configuring snmp on OpenSolaris.

snmp services on OpenSolaris are provided by a service called sma. To get snmp working on OpenSolaris:

$pfexec pkg install SUNWsmmgr

$pfexec svcadm enable sma

The configuration file is net-snmp standard stuff, but it’s concealed in /etc/sma/snmp/snmpd.conf. After changing this file, restart sma:

$pfexec svcadm restart sma

OpenSolaris will now respond as normal to snmpwalk requests from your monitoring system.

By the way, pfexec is the OpenSolaris equivalent (roughly) to sudo on Linux. It allows you to execute commands as root. The first account created, by default, is allowed to execute pfexec against all OpenSolaris commands without requiring a password. A future note will tell you how to change that…