Yet another RAID Question (YARQ)
Alex Zbyslaw
xfb52 at dial.pipex.com
Sun Jun 19 11:28:17 GMT 2005
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?
--Alex
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