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| 4 | <head> |
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| 5 | <title>smartmontools About Page (last updated $Date$)</title> |
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| 17 | <h1><a id="logo" href="http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/"><img src="smart_logo.gif" width="105" height="59" border="0" hspace="20" align="middle" name="smartmontools_Logo" alt="S.M.A.R.T. Logo" /></a> |
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| 18 | smartmontools About Page</h1> |
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| 19 | </div> |
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| 20 | |
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| 21 | <div id="mainmenu" class="nav"> |
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| 22 | <ul> |
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| 23 | <li><a accesskey="n" href="index.html">Home</a></li> |
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| 24 | <li><a href="http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/TocDoc">Documentation</a></li> |
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| 25 | <li><a accesskey="d" href="download.html">Download</a></li> |
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| 26 | <li><a accesskey="f" href="faq.html">FAQ</a></li> |
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| 27 | <li><a accesskey="h" href="help.html">Help</a></li> |
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| 28 | <li class="active"><a accesskey="a" href="about.html">About</a></li> |
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| 29 | <li><a accesskey="l" href="links.html">Links</a></li> |
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| 31 | </ul> |
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| 32 | </div> |
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| 33 | |
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| 34 | <div class="left-header"> |
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| 35 | <h2>The project smartmontools</h2> |
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| 36 | <ul class="High"> |
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| 37 | <li><a href="#history">History</a> of smartmontools</li> |
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| 38 | <li>The <a href="#team">smartmontools team</a></li> |
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| 39 | </ul> |
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| 40 | </div> |
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| 41 | <div> |
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| 42 | <h3><a name="history"></a>History of smartmontools</h3> |
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| 43 | |
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| 44 | <p>Smartmontools was derived directly from smartsuite. |
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| 45 | The smartsuite code was originally developed as a Senior Thesis by |
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| 46 | Michael Cornwell at the Concurrent Systems Laboratory (now part of the |
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| 47 | <a href="http://ssrc.soe.ucsc.edu/"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />Storage Systems Research |
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| 48 | Center</a>), Jack Baskin School of Engineering, University of |
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| 49 | California, Santa Cruz. |
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| 50 | You can find some information about the original smartsuite project here: |
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| 51 | <a href="http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/press_releases/archive/99-00/09-99/smart_software.htm"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />Press Release 1</a>, |
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| 52 | <a href="http://www.santa-cruz.com/archive/1999/September/22/local/stories/5local.htm"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />Press Release 2</a>, |
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| 53 | <a href="http://www.ucsc.edu/currents/99-00/09-27/smart.html"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />Press Release 3</a>. |
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| 54 | </p> |
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| 55 | |
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| 56 | <p>According to <a href="http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />SSRC</a> |
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| 57 | smartsuite is no longer maintained; the last release was in 2001.</p> |
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| 58 | |
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| 59 | <p>Smartmontools was first released in October 2002. It differs from smartsuite |
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| 60 | in that it supports the ATA/ATAPI-5 standard. So for example <tt>smartctl</tt> from smartsuite |
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| 61 | has no facility for printing the SMART self-test logs, and doesn't print timestamp |
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| 62 | information in the most usable way. The <tt>smartctl</tt> utility |
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| 63 | in smartmontools has added functionality for this (<tt>-q, -l selftest,-S, |
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| 64 | -T, -v and -m</tt> options), updated documentation, and also fixes small |
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| 65 | technical bugs in smartsuite. [One example: smartsuite does not actually use the |
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| 66 | ATA SMART RETURN STATUS command to find out the health status of a disk. It instead tries to infer this from the |
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| 67 | SMART Attribute values.] See the |
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| 68 | <a href="http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/browser/trunk/smartmontools/CHANGELOG">CHANGELOG</a> |
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| 69 | file in our repository for a summary of what's been done.</p> |
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| 70 | |
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| 71 | <p>The <tt>smartd</tt> utility differs from the smartsuite <tt>smartd</tt> in major ways. |
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| 72 | First, it prints somewhat more informative error messages to the syslog. |
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| 73 | Second, on startup it looks for a configuration file |
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| 74 | <tt>/etc/smartd.conf</tt>, and if <tt>smartd</tt> finds this file, it |
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| 75 | monitors the list of devices therein, rather than querying all IDE and |
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| 76 | SCSI devices on your system. (If the configuration file does not |
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| 77 | exist, then it does query all IDE and SCSI devices.) Also, it's |
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| 78 | a well-behaved daemon and doesn't leave open file descriptors and other |
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| 79 | detrius behind. In addition, the <tt>smartmontools</tt> version of |
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| 80 | <tt>smartd</tt> can be instructed (via Directives in the configuration |
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| 81 | file) to monitor for changes in a number of different disk properties: |
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| 82 | the SMART status, failure or prefailure attributes going below |
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| 83 | threshold, new errors appearing in the ATA Error Log or the SMART |
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| 84 | Self-Test Log, and so on. <tt>smartd</tt> can also send an email warning or run a |
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| 85 | user-specified executable if it detects a problem with the disk. |
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| 86 | </p> |
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| 87 | |
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| 88 | <p>The other principle difference is that smartmontools is an |
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| 89 | OpenSource development project, meaning that we keep the files in SVN, |
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| 90 | and that other developers who wish to contribute can commit changes to |
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| 91 | the repository. If you would like to contribute, please write to to <a |
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| 92 | href="http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/smartmontools-support"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />smartmontools-support</a>.</p> |
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| 93 | |
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| 94 | <p>But the bottom line is that the code in smartmontools is derived |
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| 95 | directly from smartsuite and is similar. The smartsuite package |
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| 96 | can be found <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartsuite/"><img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />here</a>.</p> |
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| 97 | |
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| 98 | |
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| 99 | <h3><a name="team"></a>The developers and supporters of smartmontools</h3> |
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| 100 | |
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| 101 | <ul class="High"> |
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| 102 | <li><strong>Bruce Allen (Initiator and Project Leader)</strong></li> |
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| 103 | </ul> |
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| 104 | |
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| 105 | <div class="left-header"><img src="pics/BruceAndCat_2008_04_22-sm.jpg" width="200" height="150" vspace="10" align="top" alt="Bruce Allen" /></div> |
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| 106 | <div><p>I am a professor of physics at the U. of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, and a Director of the Albert Einstein |
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| 107 | Institute in Hannover, which is operated by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and Leibniz University Hannover. |
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| 108 | </p> |
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| 109 | <p>I got interested in SMART because of my research work. I work on data analysis |
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| 110 | for gravitational waves (the LIGO, GEO and VIRGO detectors) and my research groups build and operate |
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| 111 | large computer clusters |
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| 112 | for this purpose. |
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| 113 | My research group at the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover operates a cluster with |
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| 114 | 2400 disks (the Atlas Cluster) and 1100 TB of storage. My research group at U. Wisconsin - Milwaukee runs a <a |
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| 115 | href="http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/beowulf/nemo/"> |
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| 116 | <img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />beowulf |
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| 117 | cluster</a> with 1200 (SATA-II) distributed disks attached to hardware RAID controllers. |
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| 118 | We have more than 300 TB disk space on that system. |
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| 119 | It's nice to have advanced warning when a disk is going to fail.</p> |
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| 120 | <p>Smartmontools is the only open-source software project that I manage. When smartmontools first started in 2002, |
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| 121 | I did most of the coding and real work. I was lucky to quickly find several other developers like Doug Gilbert and |
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| 122 | Christian Franke who |
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| 123 | knew much more than I did! These days I mostly do coordination and cheerleading - |
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| 124 | in any given technical area there are typically other developers who know more than I do. |
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| 125 | </p> |
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| 126 | <p> |
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| 127 | I also do |
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| 128 | some work on BOINC, and run the Einstein@Home distributed search for gravitational waves.</p> |
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| 129 | </div> |
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| 130 | |
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| 131 | <ul class="High"> |
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| 132 | <li><strong>Christian Franke (Developer and Maintainer)</strong></li> |
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| 133 | </ul> |
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| 134 | <div class="right-header"><img src="pics/chrfranke.jpg" width="120" height="150" vspace="10" align="top" alt="Christian Franke" /></div> |
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| 135 | <div><p>My interest in hard disk monitoring actually starts when the disk of the christmas-gift-PC for |
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| 136 | my son failed in the evening of Dec. 23, 2003. This resulted in a first Windows port of smartctl checked |
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| 137 | in on Feb. 23, 2004. Future plan for smartmontools is a major redesign of smartd and the internal device |
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| 138 | interface, which benefits from the transition from C to C++.</p> |
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| 139 | <p>My other open source contributions include some small patches for Cygwin and Mozilla.org |
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| 140 | (Firefox/Thunderbird/SeaMonkey and Bugzilla) codebase, a Windows port of hdparm, and a recent Cygwin port |
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| 141 | of GRUB2.</p> |
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| 142 | <p>In real life, I hold a degree in computer science and work for a company developing applications for |
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| 143 | banking & finance.</p> |
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| 144 | <br /></div> |
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| 145 | |
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| 146 | <ul class="High"> |
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| 147 | <li><strong>Guido Guenther (Developer and Maintainer)</strong></li> |
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| 148 | </ul> |
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| 149 | <p>Guido has a sharp eye for distribution issues and clean system architecture. |
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| 150 | He improves Makefiles, configuration and installation scripts, cares for packaging |
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| 151 | issues and makes sure that <tt>Return Values</tt> are correct. |
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| 152 | Last not least, he added CCISS (Compaq Smart Array Controller) support with |
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| 153 | contributions from Praveen Chidambaram, Douglas Gilbert and Frederic Boiteux.</p> |
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| 154 | |
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| 155 | <ul class="High"> |
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| 156 | <li><strong>Gabriele Pohl (Website Maintainer)</strong></li> |
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| 157 | </ul> |
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| 158 | |
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| 159 | <div class="left-header-yellow"><img src="pics/gap-woody.jpg" width="200" height="178" alt="Gabriele Pohl" vspace="10"/></div> |
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| 160 | |
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| 161 | <div><p>Once upon a time I got an alarming BIOS message whilst booting my computer:</p> |
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| 162 | |
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| 163 | <div class="code">SMART Failure Predicted on Primary Master:<br /> |
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| 164 | Warning! Immediately back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A Failure may be imminent..</div> |
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| 165 | |
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| 166 | <p>I was very curious, what it could be, that claimed to know, what's up with my harddisk. |
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| 167 | I started an investigation about the predicted disk error and SMART in general, |
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| 168 | which leads me straightly to smartmontools. I use it for 4 years now and wrote two |
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| 169 | <a href="http://www.dipohl.de/publikationen/anleitung-zu-smartmontools.html">articles</a> (German), |
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| 170 | to spread good news about it. To help both, the project and the users, I reorganized the smartmontools |
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| 171 | website a bit. I hope you'll like it.</p> |
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| 172 | |
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| 173 | <p>We have a main menu with seven sections, an integrated search engine and a new layout. |
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| 174 | Next step will be, to update the websites content, so that it reflects the state of the |
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| 175 | current version <tt>5.3.8</tt>. Conributions are welcome! |
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| 176 | Mail to <a href="mailto:smartmontools-support@lists.sourceforge.net">smartmontools-support</a> |
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| 177 | list, if you have questions or want to add information.</p> |
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| 178 | <br /></div> |
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| 179 | |
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| 180 | <ul class="High"> |
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| 181 | <li><strong>Erwan Velu (Packager and Maintainer)</strong></li> |
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| 182 | </ul> |
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| 183 | <div class="right-header"><img src="pics/erwan.jpg" width="120" height="180" vspace="10" align="top" alt="Erwan Velu" /></div> |
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| 184 | <div><p>My interest in SMART arose at my previous job at Mandriva. I was |
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| 185 | building up a Linux distribution to turn a set of computers into a super computer (HPC). |
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| 186 | While looking at how we can manage such a cluster, I was faced with some failing disks. |
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| 187 | Doing a short research on that problem, I found this project.</p> |
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| 188 | |
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| 189 | <p>As I am also packaging applications in RPM for Mandriva Linux, I decided |
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| 190 | to include smartmontools in it. My role is to keep smartmontools |
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| 191 | up-to-date in the Linux distribution and reporting bugs to the |
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| 192 | developers. To be honest, this happens once in a blue moon.</p> |
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| 193 | |
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| 194 | <p>Since I am implicated in the smartmontools project, friends often ask me for |
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| 195 | help in understanding how theirs disks feels ;o). So I also wrote an |
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| 196 | <a href="http://www.lea-linux.org/documentations/index.php/Hardware-hard_plus-smart"> |
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| 197 | <img src="pics/linkext.gif" width="11" height="11" border="0" alt="extLink: " />article |
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| 198 | about smartmontools</a> in French language.</p> |
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| 199 | <br /></div> |
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| 200 | |
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| 201 | <ul class="High"> |
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| 202 | <li><strong>Other portraits</strong></li> |
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| 203 | </ul> |
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| 204 | <p> will follow..</p> |
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| 205 | |
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| 206 | </div> |
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| 207 | |
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| 208 | <hr style="clear:left" /> |
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| 209 | <div align="center"><font size="-1">Hosted by<br /><a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools"><img src="http://sflogo.sourceforge.net/sflogo.php?group_id=64297&type=13" width="120" height="30" border="0" alt="Get S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools at SourceForge.net. Fast, secure and Free Open Source software downloads" /></a><br /> |
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| 210 | Maintained by: <a href="http://www.dipohl.de/">Gabriele Pohl</a><br /> |
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| 211 | Copyright (C) 2002-9 Bruce Allen, Gabriele Pohl published under <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html#SEC1">GNU GPL</a><br /> |
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| 212 | Last update: $Date$</font><br /> |
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