Sun Service Tag FAQ

The following are frequently asked questions regarding Sun Service Tag services.

• What is a Sun Service Tag?
• Why do I want my assets to be discoverable?
• How is Sun going to use the service tags?
• What are the privacy implications?
• What products are discoverable?
• What data is included in the service tag?
• Are you collecting metering or usage data, such as the number of times I open StarOffice software?
• Can I disable service tags?
• Are service tags capable of communicating with other services running on my system?
• Will service tags impact the performance of my system or software?
• On a system configured with multiple Solaris zones, is one instance of the service tags service running, or is an instance running in each zone?
• What is the Sun Service Tag footprint and process size?
• How do I enable my current installations of the Solaris OS with service tags?
• Where can I get more information?
• My Service Tags are being duplicated across systems when I use the Solaris Flash Archive (FLAR) feature. How can I prevent this?

Question: What is a Sun Service Tag?
Answer: A service tag enables automatic discovery of assets, including software and hardware. A service tag uniquely identifies each tagged asset, and allows information about the asset to be shared over a local network in a standard XML format.

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Question: Why do I want my assets to be discoverable?
Answer: One of the most basic, and at the same time, most difficult problems IT departments have is simply knowing what they have. Systems and software are installed by various team members at all times. Systems are shut down, new software is upgraded. Best practices for keeping track today often involve barcode scanning or manual spreadsheet entries. Leveraging the discovery capabilities that service tags provide gives IT new tools to manage the chaos and complexity.

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Question: How is Sun going to use the service tags?
Answer: Sun stores Service Tag information in Sun Inventory, which can be accessed by the user that registered the Service Tag or any user that they authorize. For example, access could be given to a Sun field engineer to provide them details of a particular server's configuration.

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Question: What are the privacy implications?
Answer: Service tags do not contain any personal information. They only provide an inventory list of system and software information. Additionally, service tags are local to your local area network (LAN). See below for more detailed information about the information contained in a service tag.

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Question: What products are discoverable?
Answer: Several products are discoverable, and more are being added all of the time. To find out if your asset is discoverable, go the Sun Inventory wiki, or click Discover & Register on the Sun Inventory home page. To register your Solaris™ 8, 9, and 10 Operating System (Solaris OS), download the Sun Service Tag package for Solaris OS.

Discoverable Operating Systems

• Solaris 8
• Solaris 9
• Solaris 10
• RHEL
• OEL
• SuSE
• Windows

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Question: What data is included in the service tag?
Answer: A service tag represents a specific asset (software or hardware), and contains two sets of data about that asset. The first component contains data specific to the asset. The second component contains platform data on which the product is installed, or in the case of hardware service tags, data about the hardware asset.

Product Data

• Unique identifier for that instance of the product
• Name of the product
• Product part number
• Vendor of the product
• Version of the product
• Name of product parent
• Unique identifier for product parent
• Supplemental product identifier
• User-defined product description
• Day and time that the product was installed
• Application which created the tag
• Name of container (zone) in which the product is installed

Platform Data

• System Host Name
• System Hostid
• Operating System Name
• Operating System Version
• Operating System Architecture
• System Model Name
• System Manufacturer
• CPU Manufacturer
• Serial Number
• Amount of physical memory
• Number of physical CPUs
• Number of CPU cores
• Number of CPU threads
• CPU name
• CPU clock rate

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Question: Are you collecting metering or usage data, such as the number of times I open StarOffice software?
Answer: No. Service tags are used solely to identify Sun assets to Sun. Sun will use the information to better support you and the rest of our customers. Registration data is only collected when your system administrator requests asset discovery.

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Question: Can I disable service tags?
Answer: Yes. The following are methods for disabling the service:

• Service tags are designed so that you can disable tag generation by asset. If you want to tag your Solaris OS instances, but not your Java Web ServerTM software, you can disable the tagging capability within the asset.
• You can disable the service tags ability to discover available network listeners. If you disable the discover feature, you can specify explicit IP and port information, and go directly to those listeners.
• To disable service tags completely, disable all network capabilities, including the discovery and TCP listener. This is done on systems running Solaris 10 and higher, via:

# svcadm disable stlisten stdiscover

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Question: Are service tags capable of communicating with other services running on my system?
Answer: No. The service tag components that communicate information are read-only and contained. They are not capable of accepting information, and they cannot communicate with any other services on your system.

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Question: Will service tags impact the performance of my system or software?
Answer: No. The service tag does not run until specifically queried by your system administrator. When queried, it runs for a few seconds and takes up less than 100 kilobytes of memory. When not running, the service tag has no impact on system resources.

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Question: On a system configured with multiple Solaris zones, is one instance of the service tags service running, or is an instance running in each zone?
Answer: Each instance of an operating system contains the Sun Service Tag registry, discovery, listener, and helper service. In addition, each Solaris OS zone generates a service tag for itself and identifies itself as a local zone or a global zone.

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Question: What is the Sun Service Tag footprint and process size?
Answer: The compiled size for all of the inventory components is 85 kilobytes. The registry size is measured in bytes. When running, the processes can be as large as 140 kilobytes if they use the external libraries that some XML format capabilities require.

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Question: How do I enable my current installations of the Solaris OS with service tags?
Answer: For Solaris 8, 9, and 10 OS versions, service tags are available as Solaris packages. To enable your Solaris OS systems with service tags, go to Sun Inventory. For Solaris 10 8/07 and later versions, Sun Service Tags are embedded in the OS.

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Question: Where can I get more information?
Answer: More information about registering your assets is available on the Sun Inventory Information Center and the Ops Center Information Center.

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Question: My Service Tags are being duplicated across systems when I use the Solaris Flash Archive (FLAR) feature. How can I prevent this?
Answer: The solution to this problem is to omit the Service Tag registry when creating your FLAR image. Using the (-x) option on the flar(1) command is the way to accomplish this:

# flar create -x -n <flar-name> -x /var/sadm/servicetag/registry/servicetag.xml <target flar file name>

See the Solaris 10 Installation Guide for Network Installations for more information about the flar command, and its options.