Recently I ran into an issue: the sshd service on a Solaris 10 box needed to be used with a custom configuration file. By default, the sshd service will use /etc/ssh/sshd_config. I needed it to use /etc/ssh/sshd_config_custom. I could not just modify the default configuration file. Don’t ask why – it’s complicated. So here’s what I ended up doing and this process is applicable to modifying any other Solaris 10 (and above) service:

See what SSH services are running on the system

# svc | grep ssh

online     16:00:01     svc:/network/ssh:default

Get the details for the “network/ssh” service

# svcs -l network/ssh

fmri         svc:/network/ssh:default
name         SSH server
enabled      true
state        online
next_state   none
state_time   Thu Sep 09 16:00:01 2010
logfile      /var/svc/log/network-ssh:default.log
restarter    svc:/system/svc/restarter:default
contract_id  146
dependency   require_all/none svc:/system/filesystem/local (online)
dependency   optional_all/none svc:/system/filesystem/autofs (online)
dependency   require_all/none svc:/network/loopback (online)
dependency   require_all/none svc:/network/physical (online)
dependency   require_all/none svc:/system/cryptosvc (online)
dependency   require_all/none svc:/system/utmp (online)
dependency   require_all/restart file://localhost/etc/ssh/sshd_config (online)

Create custom sshd configuration file. For this example we will just make a copy of the default sshd_config and then rename the default file to something else.

cp -p /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config_custom
mv /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/ssh_config_old

Edit the ssh.xml file containing service configuration details for network/ssh service

vi /var/svc/manifest/network/ssh.xml

Find the following line:

value='file://localhost/etc/ssh/sshd_config />'

And change it to:

value='file://localhost/etc/ssh/sshd_config_custom />'

Edit the sshd startup file:

vi /lib/svc/method/sshd

Fine the following line in the “start” section of the “case” function:

/usr/lib/ssh/sshd

And change it to:

/usr/lib/ssh/sshd -f /etc/ssh/sshd_config_custom

Finally, restart sshd service:

svcadm restart network/ssh

And you are done. They sure made managing services startup easier in Solaris 10 :-)