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SMART monitoring of bubba's HD

A collection of tips on howto tweak your Bubba.
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estorino
Posts: 26
Joined: 25 Aug 2007, 06:44
Location: Utrecht, The Netherlands

SMART monitoring of bubba's HD

Post by estorino »

First you must enable the Debian repositories so you can install software other than Excito's own updates, here's how:
http://excito.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=421

When you've done this and you're still logged in as root:

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apt-get install smartmontools
Use

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smartctl --help
to learn more.

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smartctl -i /dev/hda
for instance will show you the available information about your harddrive.

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smartctl -H /dev/hda
shows you the SMART status of the drive.

Why is all this interesting? Bubba has no RAID support or anything other than your own backup methods for preserving data in case of hardware trouble, so in order to minimize the risks all information concerning the health of your harddrive is welcome!

There's a daemon called 'smartd' which runs in the background, keeping you up to date if anything changes in the SMART status of your drive. This daemon is disabled by default, check out its config file at

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/etc/default/smartmontools
to enable the daemon, edit this file and uncomment the next line:

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#start_smartd=yes
The config file for the daemon itself is here:

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/etc/smartd.conf
You can make Bubba send you an e-mail if the SMART status is 'failed' for example by adding the next line to smartd.conf and changing the mailaddress to your own:

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/dev/hda -H -m admin@example.com
Finally. start the smartd daemon:

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/etc/init.d/smartmontools start
Check out http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

Hey, nothing beats making regular backups, but this is a nice addition... :)
Last edited by estorino on 20 May 2008, 17:49, edited 2 times in total.
GaryL
Posts: 87
Joined: 04 Sep 2007, 17:40
Location: Northern Ireland

Post by GaryL »

ooo very nice

would be even nicer to see the SMART status through the web interface.

Do you reckon there would be much to it?

A bit like NASlite:
http://www.serverelements.com/info/NASL ... Disk-0.htm
estorino
Posts: 26
Joined: 25 Aug 2007, 06:44
Location: Utrecht, The Netherlands

Post by estorino »

GaryL wrote:ooo very nice

would be even nicer to see the SMART status through the web interface.

Do you reckon there would be much to it?

A bit like NASlite:
http://www.serverelements.com/info/NASL ... Disk-0.htm
That shouldn't be too hard, all you'd have to do is create a cronjob for a check of your harddrive and write the result to a file that's accessible through the webserver.

Something like:

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0 0 * * * smartctl -H /dev/hda > /var/www/smartstatus.txt
Ok, that creates a .txt file, not .html, but that should be doable. :)
pcrene
Posts: 305
Joined: 17 May 2008, 15:49

Version trouble

Post by pcrene »

the install of Smart tools did not work here...

Since i had already trouble doing an update of the whole of sources.list...
i did not dare to do the upgrade ..

Can the bubba team lent some help of a bubba/linux hobby-ist to make a tools/webmin/stats page en integrate them into the bubba standard...
fredrik
Posts: 12
Joined: 01 Jan 2009, 11:59

smarttools

Post by fredrik »

Hi more questions.

The harddrive youre supplying with the bubba2 does not support s.m.a.r.t

you have work around
JohanSalo
Posts: 23
Joined: 17 Apr 2007, 10:05

Post by JohanSalo »

i added "-M test" in conf so its mail on start, but i cant get the mail to work
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