Dell SAS/SATA virtual disks (RAID 1)

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1

Hi, I have a Dell Studio XPS running openSUSE 11.2 with dual mirrored disks (using Dell’s SATA controller). Does anyone know how I can set up automatic monitoring of the disks so that I will be informed if either fail?

I think smartd might be what I need here. Is that correct? I added

/dev/sda -a -d sat -m <my email>
/dev/sda -a -d sat -m <my email>

smartd is running, but how do I know that it will report what I need?

I also have a client with a Dell PowderEdge SC440 with SAS 5/iR also running openSUSE 11.2. They also require automatic monitoring.

There doesn’t seem to be a SAS directive for smartd. I notice that the newer release says it does support SAS disk. I upgraded to 5.39. On restart (with DEVICESCAN as the directive) I get the following in /var/log/messages for my SAS RAID disk.

Sep 18 10:47:26 harmony-server smartd[25234]: Device: /dev/sdb, Bad IEC (SMART) mode page, err=4, skip device

I ran

smartctl -a /dev/sdb

and got the result:

smartctl 5.39.1 2010-01-28 r3054 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] (openSUSE RPM)
Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, smartmontools

Device: Dell VIRTUAL DISK Version: 1028
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Sat Sep 18 11:32:08 2010 JST
Device does not support SMART

Error Counter logging not supported
Device does not support Self Test logging

Is there some other tool/package that does support DELL virtual disks?

If anyone knows how to set that up too it would be greatly appreciated if you could let me know.

2

Has no-one got any onfo on this?

3

If it’s a Dell controller, have you checked to see if Dell provide a driver or monitoring software?

I know that for example, Dell run a RHEL repo for their server management software. For other distros I don’t know.