gmirror HD failure detection

[Alex Zbyslaw]

Robin Becker wrote:

> After using Dru Lavigne's excellent article http://tinyurl.com/da66a 
> about Raid-1 I have a full Raid-1 mirror on a new rack server. I'm 
> wondering if anyone can tell me how best to monitor the hardware 
> status to detect imminent failure of one of the disks? Do I use 
> something like smartctl in a cron or what?

Assuming that the disks support SMART then just read the man page for 
smartd.  No need for cron.  You can also schedule "short" and "long" 
tests to run in off hours.  smartmontools is easy to uninstall if it 
doesn't work for you. 

However, this will tell you that a disk is failing (or failed) which is 
not quite the same as array status.  An array (theoretically)  might be 
sub-optimal for non-SMART reasons.  Someone familiar with gmirror will 
have to answer that bit... but gmirror status -s looks from the man page 
like it might be interesting and *that* could be run from cron and 
parsed to weed out "status OK results".

--Alex