Talking Serially: Terminal Configuration in Solaris

The Service Access Facility

Sadly, Solaris throws most of what you have just learned out the window and employs a completely new, very complex, and totally unintuitive method for terminal management called the Service Access Facility (SAF). Instead of traditional gettys to watch each port for logins, SAF is a hierarchy of monitors designed to treat many different types of service requests the same way (including print and network services).

Very basically, to configure a serial port for a terminal, you must configure a port monitor (in the case of a terminal, ttymon) to watch the status of a port, and then associate that port monitor with terminal service.

The SAF configuration files are in /etc/saf. They may be edited manually if you really know what you are doing, but are typically modified with commands that will be covered later.

/etc/ttydefs

In addition to the files in /etc/saf, the ttydefs file is used by the port monitor ttymon to set up the speed and terminal settings for a terminal port. This file is very much like the gettydefs file that is used on other systems. The format of the ttydefs file is as follows:

ttylabel:initial-flags:final-flags:autobaud:nextlabel

ttylabel:

The label for the entry, which ttymon tries to match.

initial-flags:

The initial settings to which to port is set.

final-flags:

The final settings for the port. ttymon sets these after a connection request as been made and before invoking a port's service.

autobaud:

If this field contains the character `A', autobaud will be enabled. Otherwise, autobaud will be disabled. ttymon determines what line speed to set the port to by analyzing the carriage returns entered. If autobaud has been disabled, the hunt sequence is used for baud rate determination.

nextlabel:

The label of another entry that should be used if the user types a break character. This allows a a series of speeds to be linked together and cycled through, for instance from 38400 down to 300.

Setting Up a Terminal with SAF

The following section is an excerpt from an excellent source for administering serial peripherals under Solaris. The entire document, Celeste's Tutorial on Solaris 2.x Modems & Terminals is optional reading for this course.

This required reading is broken up into two sections, Celeste's copyright and the material from one section of the document. No changes have been made to the content, just the markup.

• An excerpt from Celeste's Tutorial on Solaris 2.x Modems & Terminals