when i boot up, i view whats going on and every time it says
starting smartd [failed]
what is smartd and do i need it?
Smartd monitors S.M.A.R.T. status of your disk drives (if your disks support it, and if you have it turned on, usually settable from BIOS, you can also use smartctl command to switch it on and off after you boot (again, if your disks support the feature). You can also use smartctl utility to display S.M.A.R.T. status of disks and S.M.A.R.T. properties in human readable format (among other stuff, most disks will tell you for how long they were working, how many times they were powered on/off, spinned up and down, current temperature of disk, and so on, list of actual properties reported varies from disk to disk).
In theory, S.M.A.R.T. is able to detect that something is going wrong with your disk before it actually goes south. So it gives you a warning it is time to buy replacement disk, copy your data to it, and ditch the old one. It works by monitoring various internal properties of disk (average seek times, positioning errors, read errors, and so on) that user is not normally aware of. This is theory. Sometime this works (you get warning before disk actuall dies), sometime it doesn't (disk just dies, no warning). And sometimes it gives false warnings (for example there was a bug in firmware of some Fujitsu disks that would give "old age" failure after disk was used for several months).
Do "grep smartd /var/log/messages" to see why exactly it failed. Most IDE drives have S.M.A.R.T. support (but it is often turned off in BIOS), as well as some SCSI drives. Smartd doesn't support SATA drives yet, probably will one day...
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
