F20 System Wide Change: No Default Sendmail

[Matthias Clasen]

On Mon, 2013-07-22 at 12:25 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Jul 22, 2013, at 10:25 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >> Even running the latest and greatest rawhide nothing desktop-side
> >> caught a very basic event like a failing disk!
> > 
> > GNOME Disks is supposed to pop up a notification when SMART reports
> > pre-fail status for a disk, I think. I suppose it's possible that's
> > broken on the GNOME side somehow.
> 
> Difficult to test. ;-)
> 
> GNOME Disks will poll for SMART info when it's run manually. As for notifications when the app isn't running, I'm not sure how this would work without a daemon running that polls on a schedule. Same for mdadm created RAID arrays. Neither mdadm or smartd are configured out of the box to issue notifications, and when they are so configured, both depend on email as the mechanism.
> 
> I consistently get notifications from Gnome Shell if I use LVM (integrated) RAID, but presently anaconda doesn't create this form of RAID. Instead it uses mdadm to create an explicit md device, then creates LVM on that. Whereas the integrated approach, the raid level is an attribute of the LV (it does use the md driver code, but it doesn't depend on mdadm for creation or monitoring) with its own LVM monitoring daemon.

I spent 5 minutes reconstructing my old knowledge of how this works:

The udisks system service is monitoring SMART info. GNOME disks installs
a gnome-settings-daemon plugin which is what pops up the notifications.

So no, running GNOME Disks should not be required to get such
notifications. Having it installed should be enough.

udisks even has API
http://udisks.freedesktop.org/docs/1.90.0/gdbus-org.freedesktop.UDisks2.Drive.Ata.html#gdbus-method-org-freedesktop-UDisks2-Drive-Ata.SmartUpdate
that lets you test this without taking a hammer to your disk.


Matthias