“If you have used disk drives during your career, I am sure you are well aware of the issues that arise when a device unexpectedly dies. This short article describes how to use smartmontools to view S.M.A.R.T status information, which can be used to predict if and when a device may fail.”
It does not appear to work with raid drives. Is there any drive monitor out there that does?
it doesn’t work with raid, that is unless the raid controller supports it. software raid/low end raid controllers may not, but you should still see stuff if your messages file.
As subject 🙂
but what good is it to find later that the beginning harddisk failure had been logged into the syslog since two months ago?
i mnean, who the hell greps his /var/log/messages for all kinds of stuff on a regular basis on a desktop machine?
there should be something like logwatch for desktops.
something that checks a given set of logfiles for several regular expressions and sends a popup to the user when something special happens.
Any sane admin will run logcheck or similar to periodically grep for these errors.
Otherwise, a lesser known fact is that on many modern client PC:s the system BIOS checks the “Overall disk health” value and warns you at startup about any impending failures. If you turned SMART on in BIOS, that is. It can save your day. 🙂
there is an option for smartdtools to send you an email if things go queer (you have to run smartd in the background, of course)
vi smartd.conf
# A very silent check. Only report SMART health status if it fails
# But send an email in this case
#/dev/hdc -H -m [email protected]
so, you should not worry 🙂
You can configure smartmontools to send out e-mail alerts. Take a look at the smartd -m flag.