How To Monitor Disk Errors?

[Nicolas Blais]

On November 22, 2005 09:05 pm, Drew Tomlinson wrote:
> I have an old machine running 4.11.  It died sometime last night from
> what I think was a disk problem.  The machine was still running and
> still passing packets (it is my firewall) but I could not log in via the
> console, ssh, or telnet.  I powered the machine off/on and heard the
> "click of death" coming from one of the internal IDE drives.  By some
> miracle, the machine did finally boot and is running again.
>
> I'm sure I'm on borrowed time here.  However I would like to find some
> way to monitor drive errors so I know which drive is failing so replace
> the correct drive.  I have two in the machine.  I've checked
> /var/log/messages but see no entries there regarding the drive.  Is
> there some utility that will let me see the current number of errors
> since boot?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Drew

Check out /sysutils/smartmontools in the ports.  It could be what you need.
When installed, a simple smartctl -H /dev/*disk* like :
smartctl -H /dev/ad0 will tell you if your drive is healthy or not.  

You can also set up the smartd which will check your drives at certain 
intervals.

Nicolas
-- 
FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT #1: Sat Nov 19 12:36:29 EST 2005     
root at clk01a:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/CLK01A 
PGP? (updated 16 Nov 05) : http://www.clkroot.net/security/nb_root.asc
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