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This is something that is not documented. If you do "pkg list" in OpenSolaris 2009.06, there is a column with header "UFIX". This stands for:

U -> upgradable
F -> frozen
I -> incorporated
X -> excludes

This is an updated version of a similar blog we've written a while back. There are a few different Solaris distributions out there produced both by Sun and the Open source community. Here is a quick run down on the differences. The OS source code is distributed at http://opensolaris.org.

Bleeding Edge - Community/Developer

OpenSolaris 2009.06 (Indiana releases)
* Based on OpenSolaris
* This comes with a live CD
* It is released in a 6 month cycle (or twice a month for Development builds)
* Updates are not available
* Uses IPS packaging: http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev
* Free

Sun Supported

OpenSolaris 2009.06 (Indiana release, with updates)
* Updates available for 6-18 months through https://pkg.sun.com/opensolaris/support
* Can file bugs and get phone or forum support
* Subscription fee

Solaris 10 5/09 update 7
* Six month updates
* SPARC and x86 platforms
* SRv4 packaging/repo
* Free to download and use

There are also several other Open Solaris distributions. One of which is NexentaOS, a OpenSolaris based OS topped with GNU software.

Update Aug 26th 2009: Removed SXCE, Sun is going to EOL SXCE and go in favor of the Indian Releases for future supported versions of OpenSolaris. That makes much more sense now, never understood why it wanted to have two different forks.

LSOF is a tool that's been available for ages, it can be used to "list open files". One of the nice things you can do with it is to list process IDs of a given TCP/UDP port. In Linux, people can use netstat to get this information. Solaris lacked this, so a good alternative is to use LSOF.

The basic command for that is, e.g. to search for port 7009:
lsof -i :7009

That should list the pid plus some other good information regarding that port number. A nice script we came across takes a full netstat output and maps the PID to each port:

#!/bin/sh

LSOF=/usr/local/bin/lsof

printf "%-6s %-10s %-6s %-8s\n" "Port" "Command" "PID" "User"
printf "%-6s %-10s %-6s %-8s\n" "----" "-------" "---" "----"

for PORT in `netstat -an | grep LISTEN | \
perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if /.*\.(\d+)\s+\*\.\*/' | sort -n | uniq`
do
   $LSOF -i :${PORT} 2>/dev/null | grep LISTEN | tail -1 | while read line
   do
      set $line
      COMMAND=$1
      PID=$2
      LSOF_USER=$3
      printf "%-6d %-10s %-6d %-8s\n" "$PORT" "$COMMAND" "$PID" "$LSOF_USER"
   done
done

Save that to a file, and watch the nice output.

Solaris and OpenSolaris also have similar command, pfiles. You can also use pfiles (though it doesn't do exactly what we want) to lookup all the files and sockets being used by a given process id. You can query all the PIDs running on the system and capture the port number being used.

Another good alternative is using DTrace. It should be pretty easy to make use of say, the net provider, to capture traffic on a given port and then determine the process ID through that. In a future post, we can write up some more information on this.