smart(8) Call for Testing

[Ben RUBSON]

On 29 Mar 2018 15:27, Chuck Tuffli wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 28, 2018 at 11:14 AM, Lev Serebryakov <lev at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> On 27.03.2018 22:13, Rainer Duffner wrote:
>>
>>> Maybe one of the vendors who sells FreeBSD as part of an appliance has  
>>> shown some interest in this?
>>>
>>> If you’re hardware is well-defined and thus the output is consistent, I  
>>> could imagine it’s not too difficult to parse this.
>> smartd is very important part of smartmontools, smartctl is not so.
>>
>>  And periodic self-test triggering & check is most important feature of
>> smartd, IMHO.
>>
>>  Modern HDDs are liers in SMART. And only regular self-test discover
>> real errors on surfaces in my experience.
>>
>>  So, tool without support for HDD self-tests is of little usage for
>> appliances, IMHO.
>
> Thank you for the feedback! As I don't have any experience with
> smartd, can you help me better understand which parts of it are most
> useful to you? Is it just  periodically triggering the self test or
> are there other features as well? For example, logging the SMART
> values, emailing / triggering notifications when certain criteria are
> met, monitoring the self tests, reading the error logs, etc.?

This is actually the job of smartd :
scheduling / testing / monitoring / alerting :)

Ben