Finally, someone who monitors RAID!
It is surprising to see the number of people that implement some sort of redundancy with no means of measuring when one of the components has failed. For example, building a disk mirror, but never knowing when one of them has failed.
That’s one thing that’s kept me away from using Linux Software RAID in anything serious, since I never saw a good way to determine if anything had failed until I happen to stumble upon an odd log entry that ends up meaning a failed disk.
Sys Admin magazine has a good article on software RAID where they actually tell you how to monitor for a failed disk and how to rebuild it.
I should also note that Fedora includes smartmontools, which monitor SMART capable drives (and most are) for both faults and prefaults. It somewhat makes the former link a moot point, but since you’re building redundant disks, you may as well have redundant ways of checking for failures.
Both Dell and 3ware have software to monitor arrays in Linux. Since Dell’s is based off of AMI megaraid, I’d assume that any megaraid controller would have software somewhere, too.
Which controllers do you use?
March 23rd, 2004 at 8:42 amWe’re using the Dell ones. We get the odd kernel messages, but nothing proactive (I guess logwatch will do that)
March 23rd, 2004 at 9:41 am