SMART Hard Drive monitoring and email on Ubuntu 14.xx Server
I run a server at home that runs a multitude of services for me including running my own cloud services. Because of
Configuring SMART monitoring
First thing needed is to identify drives on the system as described by Ubuntu using the commands blkid and df commands. We are looking for /dev/sd type lines which are your sata drives as seen by your system. The df command will show you standard drives mounted on you system but will not show you the actual drives of any lvm’s. The df command will also not show you any hardware raid drives. Because of this will use the blkid to find the drives that in my case are will show me the hardware raid drives attached to my machine. Highlighted are the ones I am interested in. Now when looking at the devices we are only interested in the actual drive which is the first three letters of the device name without any of the numbers – numbers like sdb1 and sdb2 are the partitions – sdb is the drive/device we care about.
# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev 7857576 8 7857568 1% /dev tmpfs 1573680 1448 1572232 1%
/run /dev/sda1 480486104 12762772 462824148 3%
/ none 4 0 4 0% /sys/fs/cgroup none 5120 0 5120 0%
/run/lock none 7868388 4 7868384 1%
/run/shm none 102400 0 102400 0%
/run/user /dev/mapper/pdc_cecgbijbe1 480486104 214127972 261458948 46%
/data /dev/sdd1 961302560 903070916 58215260 94%
/other /dev/sdf1 1922729860 1040514340 882199136 55%
/mnt/backup-external-drive
/dev/sde1 961301000 16970036 895476580 2%
/external
# blkid
/dev/sda1: LABEL="ka_root" UUID="9b98e551-3af7-4a1a-b18a-912d1f46f9ee" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda2: UUID="23793eaa-b8c8-4e3b-9347-90125961cc17" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sdb: TYPE="promise_fasttrack_raid_member" /dev/sdc: TYPE="promise_fasttrack_raid_member"
/dev/sdd1: LABEL="drive_int" UUID="56a0c3a4-7c3e-4588-ad87-bd5ad11d1098" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/mapper/pdc_cecgbijbe1: LABEL="ka_data" UUID="9e4f4fa7-49c1-4132-8347-dddd779a2bfa" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sde1: LABEL="external" UUID="5eac9e6f-e9fa-49f9-a879-e892068bd984" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sdf1: LABEL="BackupUSBdrive" UUID="8a05efe2-a397-4699-90c8-e7bdeed11523" TYPE="ext4"
From looking at these two commands I see a bunch of devices but they boil down to the following list that I am interested in –
/dev/sda
/dev/sdb
/dev/sdc
/dev/sdd
/dev/sde
/dev/sdf
Now to run some commands to ensure each drive supports the SMART protocol and enable monitoring of them if they do. This is not 100% required as is can be implied later on but is how I prefer to do this.
smartctl -i /dev/sda
smartctl -i /dev/sdb
smartctl -i /dev/sdd
smartctl -i /dev/sdc
smartctl -i /dev/sde
smartctl -s on /dev/sda
smartctl -s on /dev/sdb
smartctl -s on /dev/sdc
smartctl -s on /dev/sdd
smartctl -s on /dev/sdf
Some manual test/commands
The following are some example test we can run on the command line to let us know how our drives are doing – this is not required to setup automated monitoring but is helpful to know if you want to check on your drives manually. More info can be had about these commands using the man pages and resource list at the bottom of this post.
smartctl -c /dev/sda
smartctl -t long /dev/sda
smartctl -t short /dev/sda
Configure automated monitoring of our SMART drives
A couple files need to be modified to enable the smartmontools service and configure it to send out an alert if needed. Again for detailed information on configuring this service see the resource pages at the bottom of this post as I will not go thru all the variations, just the what I used to get this up and running.
First need to enable the service by using modifying the following file – /etc/default/smartmontools
vim /etc/default/smartmontools
vim /etc/smartd.conf
service smartmontools restart
ps aux | grep smart
Configuring Email notifications with ssmtp
apt-get install ssmtp
cd /etc/ssmtp/
vim revaliases ssmtp.conf
echo test | mail -v -s "Test ssmtp setup" chris@example.com
echo test | mail -v -s "Another TEST of ssmtp" chris@example.com
ls /usr/bin/ | grep mail
References
- http://linuxtecsun.blogspot.com/2013/02/ubuntu-how-to-configure-smartmontools.html
- https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools
- http://techedemic.com/2011/06/28/s-m-a-r-t-monitoring-and-email-notification-ubuntu-10-04/
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSMTP
- https://guylabs.ch/2013/07/18/monitor-s-m-a-r-t-with-smartmontools-in-ubuntu-13-04/
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