The Service Access Facility

The SAC administrative file

Information about all the port monitors for which the SAC daemon is responsible is stored in a file that you maintain through the sacadm(1M) command: /etc/saf/_sactab. You do not have to create this file; it exists on the delivered system.

NOTE: Do not edit this file directly. Display and update it with sacadm.

Initially, /etc/saf/_sactab is empty except for a single comment line that contains the version number of the SAC. You can use sacadm to add entries to this file which identify the port monitors on your system; that is, adding a port monitor is accomplished by adding an entry for it to this file.

The first line of /etc/saf/_sactab is typically a comment line indicating the version of the SAC.

Each line in the SAC administrative file contains five fields delimited by colons in the following format:

pmtag:pmtype:flgs:rcnt:command

These fields have the following meanings:

pmtag

A unique tag that identifies a particular port monitor. The system administrator is responsible for naming a port monitor. This tag is then used by the SAC daemon to identify the port monitor for all administrative purposes.

pmtag may consist of up to 14 alphanumeric characters.

pmtype

The type of the port monitor. In addition to its unique tag, each port monitor has a type designator. The type designator identifies a group of port monitors that are different invocations of the same entity. inetd, ttymon and listen are examples of valid port monitor types. The type designator is used to facilitate the administration of groups of related port monitors. Without a type designator, you have no way of knowing which port monitor tags correspond to port monitors of the same type.

pmtype may consist of up to 14 alphanumeric characters.

flgs

The following flags are currently defined:

d: When started, do not enable the port monitor.
x: Do not start the port monitor.

If no flag is specified, the default action is taken. By default a port monitor is started and enabled.

rcnt

The number of times a port monitor may fail before being placed in a failed state. Once a port monitor enters the failed state, the SAC daemon will not try to restart it. If a count is not specified when the entry is created, this field is set to 0. A restart count of 0 indicates that the port monitor is not to be restarted if it fails.

command

A string representing the command that will start the port monitor. The first component of the string, the command itself, must be a full pathname.

An optional comment, beginning with a hash sign (#), may be present at the end of each line in the file.

The sacadm -l command displays a complete list of entries in /etc/saf/_sactab, shown in the following output:

   PMTAG     PMTYPE   FLGS   RCNT   STATUS      COMMAND
   ttymon1   ttymon   d      0      DISABLED    /usr/lib/saf/ttymon # ttymon1
   ttymon3   ttymon   -      0      ENABLED     /usr/lib/saf/ttymon # ports board
   cots      listen   -      3      FAILED      /usr/lib/saf/listen cots #
   tcp       listen   -      0      ENABLED     /usr/lib/saf/listen tcp #