Here is how I setup SMART monitoring and maintenance of an array of Hard-Disk Drives running a Debian Squeeze.
First, let’s install the smartmontools package:
1 $ aptitude install smartmontools
We now have to check that SMART is activated on our drives:
1$ smartctl -a /dev/sdb | grep "SMART support is: Enabled"2$ smartctl -a /dev/sdc | grep "SMART support is: Enabled"3$ smartctl -a /dev/sdd | grep "SMART support is: Enabled"4$ smartctl -a /dev/sde | grep "SMART support is: Enabled"
Nowadays all modern drives are already activated in factories. But in case they’re not you can activate this feature with the following command:
1 $ smartctl -s on -a /dev/sdb
Now we have to activate the smartd daemon, and let it start automatically when the machine boot:
1$ sed -i 's/#start_smartd=yes/start_smartd=yes/g' /etc/default/smartmontools2$ sed -i 's/#smartd_opts="--interval=1800"/smartd_opts="--interval=1800"/g' /etc/default/smartmontools
For some reason, I prefer to not let smartd select by itself drives it should check. Here is how to deactivate the auto-detection:
1 $ sed -i 's/^DEVICESCAN /#DEVICESCAN /g' /etc/smartd.conf
Now let’s specify by hand the way our drives should be monitored and maintained. Here are the lines I added to /etc/smartd.conf:
/dev/sdb -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././02|L/../../6/03) -m [email protected]
/dev/sdc -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././04|L/../../6/05) -m [email protected]
/dev/sdd -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././06|L/../../6/07) -m [email protected]
/dev/sde -a -o on -S on -s (S/../.././08|L/../../6/09) -m [email protected]
Finally, we need to restart the SMART service to take into account all our changes:
1 $ /etc/init.d/smartmontools restart