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SmartOS Technical FAQs

What's the default username and password?

When the SmartOS Live Image is booted for the first time you will be prompted to set a root password.  In the event that you boot SmartOS without importing your Zpool, you will require the default root password.  When using the noimport=true option, the login is root/root. Otherwise, the randomly generated root password for each build and can be found in the SINGLE_USER_ROOT_PASSWORD.(BUILD_DATE).txt file found in the standard SmartOS download location.

Where's top?

SmartOS uses prstat instead of top; it understands SmartOS better and has lower overhead. 'prstat -Z' is a popular invocation, although there are many other command-line options; see the prstat man page for more details.

How do I start or stop system services?

SmartOS uses SMF, which has some similarities with OSX's launchd or Ubuntu's Upstart: it tracks dependencies between services, can initialize them in parallel, provides logging, and so forth. Here are some common commands:

  • svcs: lists enabled services, even if they're not running. To see all services use svcs -a
  • svcs -vx: lists services that have failed for some reason, as well as the location of their logfiles
  • svcs -Z: lists services in zones as well
  • svcadm enable <foo>: start the service named foo
  • svcadm disable <foo>: stop the service named foo
  • svcadm restart <foo>: restart the service named foo
  • svcadm clear <foo>: if a service is in maintenance mode, this clears it so it can be enabled
  • svccfg export <foo>: shows the service manifest in case you're curious about what binary is being run and how

How do I create my own zones or VMs?

How to create a zone ( OS virtualized machine ) in SmartOS

How to create a KVM VM ( Hypervisor virtualized machine ) in SmartOS

If I use a USB Key to boot, how can I upgrade SmartOS safely later?

The USB key is just a FAT32 filesystem with grub installed on it. It's a simple delivery mechanism to get the kernel & boot archive in to memory, which is why it doesn't matter if you netboot, drop the platform directory in to your linux partition and add a smartos entry to grub, or some other third option.

You can just mount the USB key, move platform to platform.old, then drop in the new platform directory from another build. You can also just drop in a new platform directory to platform.new ( or platform.date or whatever ), edit boot/grub/menu.list to point at the right place ( you can even add new menu entries ) and boot.

How do I automate setting up hostnames/static networking at deploy-time for Linux datasets?

When using a Linux instance with cloud-init this is handled automatically.

For FreeBSD KVM instances, Qemu handles this for via dhcp. Just set the IP in the VM json spec.

Where can I get more questions answered?

#illumos and #smartos on irc.libera.chat.

email: smartos [at] tritondatacenter [dot] com