On Sun, 19 Jun 2005, Alex Zbyslaw wrote:
P.U.Kruppa wrote:
our school has just received a new HP ProLiant and I set up FreeBSD 5.4
-RELEASE with a RAID 1 system on it (using ciss driver).
Is there any software tool which can show me the state of the two SCSI
discs (if one is failing or if they are mirrored sorrectly) or is it
sufficient to watch the little LEDs on the box?
That's a good question, and I only have a partial answer for you. You can
look at sysutils/smartmontools port which will show you the SMART status for
the disks that it can see. If you can see both disks (which I *think* would
have devices like /dev/sd0, /dev/sd1) then you ought to know if the disks are
failing. SCSI disks, from my limited experience, don't show as much info as
ATA disks, but so far both Quantum and Fujitsu do seem to have supported
SMART at a basic level. You should be able to tell what FreeBSD can see in
the way of disks by examining /var/run/dmesg.boot.
A word of caution, though. A Linux system (which I help administer) had two
SCSI disks mounted as RAID-1 through some kind of Adaptec controller.
Recently the machine crashed and it transpires that one of the disks hadn't
been written to since 2002! I am told that the bootup screen showed the
RAID-1 as working, and Linux could *only* see one virtual disk -- the
supposed RAID mirror. So, I think your question is a very good one! We had
(apparently) no way of knowing what was going on. The machine crashed with no
messages whatsoever, after losing all access to its disks, and there was no
indication that RAID-1 was not functioning.
I *think* that the RAID controller should spot when a disk is failing and
notify you (through its driver) through console messages and
/var/log/messages. I too would love an answer to this question for any
decent SCSI controller under FreeBSD (e.g. Dell PowerEdge 2850 with PERC
4e/Di RAID controller). Can you, in general, see through the RAID controller
to monitor individual disks?
No, the HP manual says one can check the disks via some sort of
LED blinking code. But I have no experience with that, since it
is a new machine.
Uli.
--Alex
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* Peter Ulrich Kruppa - Wuppertal - Germany *
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