Re: [Smartmontools-support]getting messages and don't know what they mean

[Bruce A. <ba...@gr...>]

Hi Martin,

> > > Now I get log entries and don't know exactly what they mean. I hope
> > > that you can help me out *and* point me to a reference where I can
> > > look them up. What do each of these mean, and which ones should
> > > I worry about?
> > 
> > None of these is anything you need to worry about.  In fact you might want
> > to turn off the tracking of these attributes -- it's mostly useful for
> > research purposes.
> 
> I wonder what causes them. My smartd.conf contains the following
> line:
> 
>   /dev/hda -d ata -o on -H -f -t -l selftest -l error -m root -M daily
> 
> Which tag is responsible? Since I don't want to turn anything but
> these research messages, I prefer to ask. It is -t, right?

I'm afraid that the smartd/smartctl documentation is getting rather long!  
If you dig through the smartd man page you'll find the comment:
 
       If you are not sure which  Directives  to  use,  I
       suggest  experimenting  for  a  few  minutes  with
       smartctl to  see  what  SMART  functionality  your
       disk(s) support(s).  If you do not like voluminous
       syslog messages, a good choice of smartd  configu-
       ration file Directives might be:
       -H -l selftest -l error -f.
       If you want more frequent information, use: -a.

In your case, the "-t" Directive is enabling "tracking".  This is what's
causing all of the syslog messages that you are seeing.  To turn them off,
just remove the "-t" from your list of Directives.

Cheers,
	Bruce