Instal vsftpd as a service in Solaris

Question

I'm just starting out with a hosting company called Joyent, who seem to be really neat. Their dedicated servers come with Solaris installed, and by default, allow support for SFTP only. This would be OK, except that clientside support for SFTP is terrible in Windows, so I've installed Vsftpd to use more traditional means.

With much digging, I figured out where it dropped the executable and got Vsftpd to work just fine in standalone mode, but it doesn't appear to have installed it as a system service, because 'svcadm' has no entry for it. (I'm very much used to a linux kernel, so Solaris is a black box for me right now.) The only documentation I could find on svcadm involves a complicated system involving XML files, which is a little much to take in.

Is this the only way to install vsftpd as a service? Does anyone know of an easier way, or is there any logical, 'I haven't seen this before' style documentation on the service import functions? It's not really that much of an issue (the server rarely goes down, and starting vsftpd back up if it does is a quick SSH prompt away) but I'd like to do things properly and have the FTP server be managed using the system's tools.

Thanks. ^_^

Answer 1

Here is the BigAdmin guide on creating a service:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/sdev_intro.jsp

Answer 2

Also have a look at filezilla which is a decent SCP/SFTP client:

http://filezilla-project.org/

Answer 3

Note that Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris still support the traditional System V rc start/stop scripts. So if you only want simple management (i.e. start service at boot), just create a /etc/rc3.d/S99vfstpd script launching that daemon and you are set.