Monitoring raid health with mpt

[Chris Hastie]

I have a Dell PowerEdge 860 with SAS 5iR RAID controller and FreeBSD
6.2. The controller is configured for RAID 1. The controller is
recognised as mpt0 and seen as a SCSI device da0. All seems to be
working fine, but is there any way to tell if one of the disks fails?
Lots of searching has suggested that most people reckon 'no', but some
reckon sysctl -a | grep nonoptimal_volumes should come up with something
useful. I've had a poke around in the source, which is probably
pointless since my knowledge of C is next to zilch. But it looks like a
number of sysctl oids are defined in mpt_raid.c: vol_member_wce,
vol_queue_depth, vol_resync_rate and nonoptimal_volumes. I see none of
these, just a couple from mpt.c:

paddington# sysctl dev.mpt.0
dev.mpt.0.%desc: LSILogic SAS/SATA Adapter
dev.mpt.0.%driver: mpt
dev.mpt.0.%location: slot=8 function=0
dev.mpt.0.%pnpinfo: vendor=0x1000 device=0x0054 subvendor=0x1028
subdevice=0x1f09 class=0x010000
dev.mpt.0.%parent: pci2
dev.mpt.0.debug: 3
dev.mpt.0.role: 1

Should I expect to see some other values? Will the nonoptimal_volumes
value turn up if a drive fails? Or will I see some messages in syslog?
Anything that will give me some notice of a failed drive would help -
the machine is colocated so keeping an eye open for flashing LEDs isn't
really an option :(

This is the relevant bit of demesg:

mpt0: <LSILogic SAS/SATA Adapter> port 0xec00-0xecff mem
0xfe9fc000-0xfe9fffff,0xfe9e0000-0xfe9effff irq 16 at device 8.0 on pci2
mpt0: [GIANT-LOCKED]
mpt0: MPI Version=1.5.13.0
mpt0: mpt_cam_event: 0x16
mpt0: Unhandled Event Notify Frame. Event 0x16 (ACK not required).
mpt0: mpt_cam_event: 0x12
mpt0: Unhandled Event Notify Frame. Event 0x12 (ACK not required).
mpt0: mpt_cam_event: 0x12
mpt0: Unhandled Event Notify Frame. Event 0x12 (ACK not required).
mpt0: mpt_cam_event: 0x16
mpt0: Unhandled Event Notify Frame. Event 0x16 (ACK not required).
mpt0: mpt_cam_event: 0xb
mpt0: Unhandled Event Notify Frame. Event 0xb (ACK not required).

da0 at mpt0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <Dell VIRTUAL DISK 1028> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-5 device
da0: 300.000MB/s transfers, Tagged Queueing Enabled
da0: 237464MB (486326272 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 30272C)
Trying to mount root from ufs:/dev/da0s1a



-- 
Chris Hastie
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