#4821 SMART Drive Status module incorrectly shows some drives as not SMART enabled

[Nick G.]

When using the SMART Drive Status modulel on a system with multiple drives, several drives incorrectly state that "SMART Enabled? No" when selected. As such, the module does not display any additional SMART attributes. However, running smartctl from the command line:

[user@localhost]~ smartctl -a /dev/sdb

reveals SMART support is indeed available and enabled for all drives, including drives the Webmin module lists as "SMART Enabled? No."

The issue seems to happen more often if the drives in question are attached via external enclosure, however this seemingly shouldn't make a difference as smartctl sees the drives just fine and returns full attributes.

Currently experiencing this problem on a system running CentOS 7.2.1511 (with SMARTsuite v. 6.2) and RHEL 6.8 (with SMARTsuite v. 5.43).

[Jamie Cameron]

Are the problem drives connected via any kind of hardware RAID device?

Also, what does the command smartctl -i /dev/sdb output?

[Nick G.]

The problem drives are not connected to a hardware RAID controller, but they are configured as a software RAID array (via mdadm).

Doing smartctl -i /dev/sdb gives the following output:

[root@localhost]~% smartctl -i /dev/sdb
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-3.10.0-327.28.3.el7.x86_64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Western Digital Red (AF)
Device Model:     WDC WD20EFRX-68AX9N0
Serial Number:    WD-WMC301385530
LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 65887e1c1
Firmware Version: 80.00A80
User Capacity:    2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
Sector Sizes:     512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 3.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Mon Sep 19 10:51:49 2016 CDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

When viewing the drive via Webmin, the "status" box states:

Supports SMART? No
SMART enabled? No 

[Jamie Cameron]

In your /etc/webmin/smart-status/config file, do you have the line ata=1 ? If so, try changing it to ata=0

[Nick G.]

Ah, there we go. It was originally set to ata=1. Changing it to ata=0 appears to fix the problem; selecting a drive that previously failed to display properly in Webmin now shows full drive information (and the statuses for "Supports SMART" and "SMART enabled" are now "yes").

Sorry about that. I assume this is the flag for Force ATA Query Mode? I would not have thought that flag would make such a difference. Thanks!

[Jamie Cameron]

Yes, that corresponds to "Force ATA Query Mode". It should be off by default though.

[Nick G.]

Ok. To the best of my knowledge, I did not turn it on, so I assume that a recent build/version of Webmin has this switch set to "on" by default.

[Jamie Cameron]

Ok, I see now - that option is on by default on CentOS systems, but really it doesn't need to be on CentOS 7+. I'll fix this default in the next Webmin release.