smartd?

[John Gray]

Hello all . . thanks for the great help I have received from this list
so far.

When fedora is booting I get an error regarding "smartd".

Can anyone tell me what that is?

Thanks

John

[Bevan C. Bennett]

John Gray wrote:
> When fedora is booting I get an error regarding "smartd".
> Can anyone tell me what that is?

It monitors hard drive health in compatible harddrives.

% man smartd
NAME
        smartd - SMART Disk Monitoring Daemon

SYNOPSIS
        smartd [options]

FULL PATH
        /usr/sbin/smartd

PACKAGE VERSION
        smartmontools-5.21 "$Date: 2003/10/13 14:31:34 $"

DESCRIPTION
        smartd  is  a  daemon  that  monitors the Self-Monitoring, 
Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) system built into  many  ATA-3 
  and  later ATA, IDE and SCSI-3 hard drives. The purpose of SMART is to 
monitor the reliability of the hard drive and predict drive failures, 
and to  carry out  different  types  of  drive self-tests.  This version 
of smartd is compatible with  ATA/ATAPI-5  and  earlier  standards  (see 
  REFERENCES below)

smartd  will attempt to enable SMART monitoring on ATA devices 
(equiva-lent to smartctl -s on ) and polls these and SCSI devices every 
30 minutes   (configurable),  logging  SMART  errors  and  changes  of 
SMART Attributes via the SYSLOG interface.  The default  location  for 
these SYSLOG notifications and warnings is /var/log/messages.

If  you send a USR1 signal to smartd it will immediately check 
the status of the disks, and then return to polling the disks  every  30 
  minutes. See the ´-i´ option below for additional details.
[ ... ... ...]

[Stephen Walton]

On Wed, 2004-01-14 at 15:23, Bevan C. Bennett wrote:
> John Gray wrote:
> > When fedora is booting I get an error regarding "smartd".
> > Can anyone tell me what that is?
>
> It monitors hard drive health in compatible harddrives.

What I've done on my systems, to keep it simple, is comment out the
/dev/hda line in /etc/smartd.conf and add to the end the line:

DEVICESCAN -H -m diskerror@host

This scans every device from /dev/hda through /dev/hdz and /dev/sda
through /dev/sdz.  A hardware failure will generate an e-mail to the
given address.

Yes, I know smartd has lots more capabilities than that.  In addition to
the man page, there was an article about it in Linux Journal in the
January 2004 issue.  But an e-mail when I'm about to lose a disk is a
lot more warning than I used to get, which was none at all.

[Samuel Flory]

John Gray wrote:
> Hello all . . thanks for the great help I have received from this list 
> so far.
>
> When fedora is booting I get an error regarding "smartd".
>
> Can anyone tell me what that is?

See "man smartctl".  The error is likely do to it trying to access 
you cdrom.  See the below example where hda is a cdrom drive, and hde 
and hdg are hard drives.

[root@goblin root]# service smartd restart
Shutting down smartd:                                      [FAILED]
Starting smartd:                                           [FAILED]
[root@goblin root]# tail  /var/log/messages
==> /var/log/messages <==
Jan 15 15:20:49 localhost smartd: smartd shutdown failed
Jan 15 15:20:49 localhost smartd[18095]: smartd version 5.21 Copyright 
(C) 2002-3 Bruce Allen
Jan 15 15:20:49 localhost smartd[18095]: Home page is 
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
Jan 15 15:20:49 localhost smartd[18095]: Opened configuration file 
/etc/smartd.conf
Jan 15 15:20:49 localhost smartd[18095]: Configuration file 
/etc/smartd.conf parsed.
Jan 15 15:20:49 localhost smartd[18095]: Device: /dev/hda, opened
Jan 15 15:20:49 localhost smartd[18095]: Device: /dev/hda, unable to 
read Device Identity Structure
Jan 15 15:20:49 localhost smartd[18095]: Unable to register ATA device 
/dev/hda at line 30 of file /etc/smartd.conf
Jan 15 15:20:49 localhost smartd[18095]: Unable to register device 
/dev/hda (no Directive -d removable). Exiting.
Jan 15 15:20:49 localhost smartd: smartd startup failed
[root@goblin root]# vi /etc/smartd.conf

Change
/dev/hda -H -m [e-mail]
to
/dev/hde -H -m [e-mail]
/dev/hdg -H -m [e-mail]

[root@goblin root]# service smartd restart
Shutting down smartd:                                      [FAILED]
Starting smartd:                                           [  OK  ]
[root@goblin root]# tail /var/log/messages
==> /var/log/messages <==
Jan 15 15:23:50 localhost smartd[18125]: Configuration file 
/etc/smartd.conf parsed.
Jan 15 15:23:50 localhost smartd[18125]: Device: /dev/hde, opened
Jan 15 15:23:50 localhost smartd[18125]: Device: /dev/hde, not found in 
smartd database.
Jan 15 15:23:50 localhost smartd[18125]: Device: /dev/hde, is SMART 
capable. Adding to "monitor" list.
Jan 15 15:23:50 localhost smartd[18125]: Device: /dev/hdg, opened
Jan 15 15:23:50 localhost smartd[18125]: Device: /dev/hdg, not found in 
smartd database.
Jan 15 15:23:51 localhost smartd[18125]: Device: /dev/hdg, is SMART 
capable. Adding to "monitor" list.
Jan 15 15:23:51 localhost smartd[18125]: Monitoring 2 ATA and 0 SCSI devices
Jan 15 15:23:51 localhost smartd[18127]: smartd has fork()ed into 
background mode. New PID=18127.
Jan 15 15:23:51 localhost smartd: smartd startup succeeded