smart(8) Call for Testing

[Charles Sprickman]

> On Mar 27, 2018, at 12:45 PM, Miroslav Lachman <000.fbsd at quip.cz> wrote:
> 
> Chuck Tuffli wrote on 2018/03/27 16:32:
>> On Mon, Mar 26, 2018 at 1:59 PM, Mark Saad <nonesuch at longcount.org> wrote:
>> ...
>>> I was thinking more along the lines of when smartctl reports the overall-health
>>> which is always a good time to read; and very Monty Python-eske
>>> 
>>> SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
>>> Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
>>> 
>>> https://serverfault.com/questions/114196/smart-warns-me-but-i-dont-trust-it
>> This app is different from others in that it only reports the values;
>> it is up to the user / script / etc. to provide analysis. In the
>> serverfault example, spin-up time is attribute ID 3. One of my drives
>> shows:
>> $ smart -t da0 | grep "208 3"
>> 208 3 39 0 100 100 1029
>> smartctl shows it as follows
>> $ smartctl -A /dev/da0
>> ...
>>   3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   100   100   001    Pre-fail
>> Always       -       1029
>> It would be up to the user or script to decide at what point this
>> might indicate an imminent failure.
> 
> What is the purpose of this utility and why it should be in base if almost everyone will need to write something to do the "real job" or "pkg install smartmontools”.

I have to agree - this is kind of a prior-century tool as far as user friendliness it seems.

What is the goal of this tool?  The main use for smartmontools seems to be to pluck information about the drive and act on some very specific items (for example, polling the “media wearout indicator” on SSDs is very useful, or read error rates on HDs.  But the smartmontools folks seem to spend a fair amount of time with putting drive data in their tool so that meaningful data is presented to the user.  Without that level of functionality out of the box, what’s the argument for this being in base vs. being a 3rd party tool that lives in the ports tree?  Think of the people that answer mailing list and forum questions when considering adding something like this to base…

Again, maybe I’m just missing something or maybe this is here for a particular vendor that needs it or something.

Charles

> 
> Maybe I just don't see something...
> 
> Miroslav Lachman
> 
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