[smartmontools-support]smartd syntax and email questions

[William F. P. <po...@ho...>]

Bruce,

smartd is a great way to monitor the health of our disk drives in our 
60-node cluster (where we know they will fail with regularity).  Thank you!

I have two brief questions:

1.  We are using SATA (not ATA) drives behind a 8003 3ware 
controller.  Why does
      smartctl -a -d 3ware,0 /dev/twe0
work,
      smartctl -a -d 3ware,0 /dev/sdc
fail?  The documentation implies that one could use either syntax.  FYI,
      # ls -alF /dev/sdc
      brw-r-----  1 root disk 8, 32 Dec 13 16:42 /dev/sdc
      # ls -alF /dev/twe0
      crw-------  1 root root 254, 0 Dec 13 16:43 /dev/twe0

2.  We would like to verify that our /etc/smartd.conf will correctly 
send us a mail message in the event of error.
      # cat /etc/smartd.conf
      /dev/hda -H -m root@localhost.localdomain
      /dev/twe0 -d 3ware,0 -H -m root@localhost.localdomain
      /dev/twe0 -d 3ware,1 -H -m root@localhost.localdomain
Is there anyway to cause smartd.conf to mail a diagnostic report, 
aside from inserting a bad disk into the system?  We want to verify 
that our email forwarding from the compute nodes on our cluster is 
set up correctly, and want smartd to send us something, even if the 
disks are healthy.

Thanks for a great service!

Will Polik


================================
Dr. William F. Polik
Hofma Professor of Chemistry

Department of Chemistry
Hope College
35 East 12th Street
Holland, MI  49422-9000
USA

po...@ho...
http://www.chem.hope.edu/~polik
tel: (616) 395-7639
fax: (616) 395-7118
================================