The basic premise behind SmartOS is to provide a netbooted global zone, and then do actual work inside KVM or zone-based virtual machines. This has a number of advantages, not least that it’s trivial to upgrade to a newer release - you simply boot a newer image.

However, the read-only nature of the global zone means that if you want to make changes to the global zone, then they need to be read from permanent storage, rather than making changes as you would normally.

SmartOS creates a /usbkey file system on stable storage which holds configuration for the global zone, and an init script /lib/svc/method/smartdc-config which sources the file /usbkey/config for configuration details. By default this will mostly include details you provided at install time, however there are additional values you can set to customise the global zone further.

Here are a couple that I have found, and need for my personal use.

Upload a root authorized_keys file

The root user’s home directory is provided from the ramdisk, so any changes you make will be wiped out on the next boot. This is presumably so that newer images can make changes to the shell rc files, for example to update $PATH without worrying about all users having to merge these changes.

However, I’m not one for typing in passwords all day, so in order to store a /root/.ssh/authorized_keys file you can do this:

mkdir -p /usbkey/config.inc
# paste your key into this file
vi /usbkey/config.inc/authorized_keys
echo "root_authorized_keys_file=authorized_keys" >>/usbkey/config

The root_authorized_keys_file variable points to a file in /usbkey/config.inc, you can of course change the name if you wish.

Set a keyboard map

By default a US keymap will be loaded for the console, if you want to use a different one then find a suitable layout in /usr/share/lib/keytables/type_6 (in my case uk) and then:

echo "default_keymap=uk" >>/usbkey/config

Look for more tweaks

As of time of writing (joyent_20120405T204624Z), these two appear to be the only tweaks available which aren’t already used by default, however this may change in the future. To see if there are any newer ones available, you can:

grep CONFIG_ /lib/svc/method/smartdc-config

and then have a deeper look into the script to see how they are used ;-)

Run ad-hoc scripts

Note that while you may be tempted to think “aha, it’s just a shell script, I can use it like rc.local”, you can’t - it’s explicitly parsed into variables, and trying to put commands in will just break the init script.

However, the /lib/svc/method/manifest-import script does import any SMF manifests it finds in /opt/custom/smf, so if you want to run arbitrary scripts, then have a look at @ryancnelson’s example and modify to suit your tastes.