Re: What is smartd?

On 03/24/2004 10:27 PM, Wolfgang Gill wrote:

On Wed, 24 Mar 2004 23:49:41 +0530, Kaustubh Ghosh wrote

I have a peculiar situation:
When my FC1 boots up,it gives a message:
Starting smartd: [FAILED]
When it shuts down ,it gives message:
Stopping smartd: [FAILED]
Everything ,the desktop etc. works fine -there is no problem.But what is 'smartd' and why does it fail? Thanks in advance.

You need to enable S.M.A.R.T in you systems BIOS (It's disabled by default).
Else you will get this error. ALL new drives these days have S.M.A.R.T
technology built-in. The HDD's hardware simply monitors the HDD and when there
are problems, it will inform either the BIOS or OS's S.M.A.R.T monitoring
software of a possible HDD failure.

This is getting interesting. I wondered, when there's a problem, how does smartd let you (user or root) know that there's a problem? It's all there in the man page. It checks every 30 minutes (configurable) and uses SYSLOG, so the errors probably end up in /var/log/messages on the local computer, unless you've set up a syslog server. Apparently at startup it can get a lot of "missing block-major-xx" errors, which are "mostly harmless," if it's been configured to look for non-existent drives especially.

I was pleased to see that even though I've put zero effort into smartd, it appears to be working perfectly on my computer (these are the smartd startup messages in my /var/log/messages) :

Mar 24 09:20:58 morgan4-f smartd[3246]: smartd version 5.21 Copyright (C) 2002-3 Bruce Allen
Mar 24 09:20:58 morgan4-f smartd[3246]: Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
Mar 24 09:20:58 morgan4-f smartd[3246]: Opened configuration file /etc/smartd.conf
Mar 24 09:20:58 morgan4-f smartd[3246]: Configuration file /etc/smartd.conf parsed.
Mar 24 09:20:58 morgan4-f smartd[3246]: Device: /dev/hda, opened
Mar 24 09:20:58 morgan4-f smartd[3246]: Device: /dev/hda, not found in smartd database.
Mar 24 09:20:59 morgan4-f smartd[3246]: Device: /dev/hda, is SMART capable. Adding to "monitor" list.
Mar 24 09:20:59 morgan4-f smartd[3246]: Monitoring 1 ATA and 0 SCSI devices
Mar 24 09:20:59 morgan4-f smartd[3248]: smartd has fork()ed into background mode. New PID=3248.
Mar 24 09:20:59 morgan4-f smartd: smartd startup succeeded

(I rebooted yesterday morning). There are no other smartd messages since then, which is good news!

Here's what I still wonder: how well does SMART work? If I aggressively monitor my smartd errors, will I be guaranteed to catch a failing drive before it dies completely? Or when they die, do they mostly die all at once, not giving smartd a chance to warn you ahead of time? And are there any UI elements to smartd, so that you'll be warned when a problem is logged, without having to go check /var/log/messages, or are you expected to use whatever other log monitoring tools you've already set up?

I also think it's kind of funny that this is out there now, now that drives hardly fail anymore. I wish I had this 10 years ago. Although I still see situations where certain groups of drives are bad (for example, a bunch we bought for some Macs in our Design department last year all failed). Pretty neat.

--Matt