What is smartd?

[Per Bjornsson]

On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 07:23, Michal Jaegermann wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 09:39:38AM +0100, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:
> > It's a monitor for IDE hard disks.  I've also seen it fail to start in
> > some cases, but only on systems that don't actually have any IDE hard
> > disks (CDroms don't count.)

For me it only finds the IDE disks that are first in line with the
default config file; as soon as it hits a CD-ROM it stops scanning as
far as I can tell. On one computer none of the hard disks are on add-in
controllers, with only a CD-ROM on the southbridge. With the default
config file, smartd errors out on startup even though there are three
S.M.A.R.T.-capable IDE drives in the machine.

> It seems also depend on a driver.  When my SATA disk was showing
> up as /dev/hde then smartd was happy and was saying "monitoring ...".
> Once this disk moved to /dev/sda then smartd does not want to
> do anything with it.

Yes, the switch happened since the configuration was changed from using
the /drivers/ide SATA support to Jeff Garzik's libata SATA driver. As
far as I know support for S.M.A.R.T. hasn't been added yet to the libata
drivers:

http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0405.1/0425.html

(S.M.A.R.T. is discussed at the end of that posting; as far as I know
"soon" hasn't arrived yet ;) )

> In case you wonder a smartd configuration file was updated. :-)

You mean you did, or it happened automatically, as Alan Cox seemed to be
indicating that it might do? I have never seen smartd.conf be updated
from the default...

/Per

-- 
Per Bjornsson <perbj at stanford.edu>
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University