[CentOS] smartd and palimpsest

[Robert Heller]

At Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:24:23 -0600 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote:

> 
> On Fri, 12 Aug 2011 04:05:47 +0000
> Joseph L. Casale wrote:
> 
> > I think you misunderstood the first reply: smartd, as in the init script is a
> > means to alert root of pending issues, _it_ doesn't present the data, _that_
> > init script simply checks it and reports it. You don't need it running to
> > make the data available, the attributes exist in the device.
> 
> Which still doesn't answer my question.  Perhaps I'm wording it poorly -- I'll
> try again:
> 
> I load palimpsest and click on the entry for my hard drive, then click on the
> button labelled "SMART Data" and I see this on the first line of the window
> that opens:
> 
> Updated: 14 minutes ago
> 
> My question is, what happened 14 minutes ago?  I didn't do anything 14 minutes
> ago, so something apparently ran in the background and updated that data.  What
> is that something and how often does it run?

The disk's *firmware* updated itself.  So long as the *disk* is powered
up and spinning, its *firmware* is 'running' (or runs when the disk is
accessed or something like that).  Modern disks are a long, long way
from the simple MFM drives of the 1970s (which presented little more
than a buffered interface to the drive mechanism and read/write heads
to the host controller -- eg little more than a simple floppy disk
drive) -- modern disks have actual embedded micro-processors on them
doing various stuff, including monitoring and logging things like
sector errors, drive temp., and so on.

Appearently, palimpsest does some of what smartctl does: accesses the
SMART data on the drive.  This is completely independent of smartd. 
Smartd is a daemon that runs in the background and periodicly accesses
the SMART data on the drive(s) and if there is some sort of notworthly
problem or condition (too hot, bad sectors being remapped, etc.), it
logs it and sends an E-Mail to root at localhost.

> 
> 
> 

-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software        -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
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