How to detect hard disk failure ?

[Alexander Haderer]

At 09:27 16.05.2003 -0500, Pranav A. Desai wrote:
>....
>The other thing that I thought of doing is to capture /var/log/messages
>for any errors regarding disks. But I have two problems with that.
>1) I dont know how to do tail -f in shell script.

Take a look at fetchlog, it was made just for this kind of job:

     http://fetchlog.sourceforge.net


>2) I am not sure if messages gives all kinds of disk errors.

disk error messages appear as kernel messages, and they are part of 
messages. See /etc/syslog.conf. If you try fetchlog think about a special 
logfile for kernelmessages only. Again: man syslogd, man syslog.conf, man 
newsyslog.

with best regards,

         Alexander



-- 
Alexander Haderer             Charite Berlin - Germany