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SimonJGreen
Asked: 2012-09-22 13:35:08 +0800 CST

Monitoring physical disk health in Ubuntu

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The title is pretty self explanatory really! How can I trigger an email if physical disk health degrades? Also as a side point, how can I do similar for software raid or zfs array health?

ubuntu

2 Answers

  1. Use Smartmontools with Ubuntu. The following is a good tutorial, and I used this on my home desktop machine. Since this is a desktop, I use GSmartControl which provides a nice interface.

    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools

    For my production servers (which are not Ubuntu), I still use Smartmontools. It's archaic, but the best thing available.

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  2. Best Answer

    This depends on a variety of things. Many raid-controllers have their own tools to query this kind of information;

    • HP's SmartArray-controllers use HP's hpacucli-tool. I would in general recommend using this nagios plugin for checking the health of those disks, and HP server health in general.

    • DELL's servers have their own openmanage-drivers that needs to be queried. A good Nagios-plugin for this is to be found here.

    • If your harddrives support S.M.A.R.T (I believe all of them nowadays do), you can use check_smartmon.

    Both of the above check RAID-status as well as physical drives. In some cases, if you make sure to update the plugins now and then - you will also be told when it's appropriate to update your firmware.

    • For software RAID in Linux, check_md_adm can be used.

    • There's a plugin for monitoring ZFS-pools on Nagios Exchange: link.

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