I am currently running CentOS 5 and looking for a terminal command that can allow me to monitor the status of the RAID set up (ie, if a drive is down) without having to get into the kernel. This is a live web server afterall.
update: specs are its a dell sc1435 with SAS 5i/R controller.
If you're using software RAID with a regular disk controller then use:
where is /dev/md0 for example. This will show you the current status. If a drive fails, you'll also see lots of nastiness in /var/log/messages.
it's raid dependent. for lsi [ it's in plenty of dell and hp servers ] you use tool called MegaCLI.
for 3ware cards - tw_cli
it usually comes with 'drivers' or documentation for your hardware.
If this is a software raid (mdadm) and you want to look at the current status you could simply do a cat /proc/mdstat. If you want to have something where the screen is refreshed every 10 seconds you could do a watch -n 10 cat /proc/mdstat.
Dell probably provide a tool to monitor it, but I can hazard a guess that it will be bloated and implemented with Java, like most lacklustre OEM utilities.
Fortunately enough it appears that the SC1435 is supported by the wonderful mpt-status utility. Just make sure that you have the following options enabled in your kernel:
You can then use mpt-status from the CLI to view the health of your RAID array.
I personally then use a simple Python script called from cron which periodically checks the status and issues us alerts by email. In a similar fashion to how mdadm behaves. You can of course specify how frequently you wish to check. Feel free to use it yourself:
mdadm offers detailed information about every aspect of the Linux software raid.
watch -n 10 cat /proc/mdstat this will setup on u r system