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 _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
