Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 17:30:34 +0200 (CEST) From: "P.U.Kruppa" <root@pukruppa.de> To: Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52@dial.pipex.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Yet another RAID Question (YARQ) Message-ID: <20050619172826.K11229@www.pukruppa.net> In-Reply-To: <42B556CE.6020103@dial.pipex.com> References: <20050619074720.V11229@www.pukruppa.net> <42B556CE.6020103@dial.pipex.com>
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On Sun, 19 Jun 2005, Alex Zbyslaw wrote: > 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? No, the HP manual says one can check the disks via some sort of LED blinking code. But I have no experience with that, since it is a new machine. Uli. > > --Alex > > ********************************************* * Peter Ulrich Kruppa - Wuppertal - Germany * *********************************************
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