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Hongli Lai
Asked: 2011-04-24 09:36:00 +0800 CST

Is the smartmontools daemon running regular health checks?

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My server has 2 harddisks. I've installed smartmontools on Debian with apt-get install smartmontools, enabled it in /etc/default/smartmontools (start_smartd=yes) and started the daemon (/etc/init.d/smartmontools start).

My /etc/smartd.conf contains this:

DEVICESCAN -d removable -n standby -m [email protected] -M exec /usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner

Is the smartmontools now configured to run regular health checks? If so, how do I see when it does that? I don't see any indication in smartctl -l selftest of health checks being run regularly; the command only showed the two tests I recently ran manually. I also don't see anything in /var/log/messages that indicates regular health checks are being run.

hard-drive debian monitoring

2 Answers

  1. If it is running them, then they will show up in -l selftest and syslog. I don't have experience with the DEVICESCAN option, you can probably add a -s directive on the DEVICESCAN line to enable scheduled scanning.

    I have my disks individually configured with:

    /dev/sda -d ata -a -s (S/../.././06|L/../../6/06) -m <email>

    That does a short test every morning and a long test on Saturdays.

    If you add specific configuration for your disks, then comment out the DEVICESCAN entry.

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  2. For notifications there is smart-notifier.

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