Mag Gam wrote:

At my university we use HP hardware exclusively. When we build CentOS our Unix SA is running several HP utilities. I am wondering what some of these utilities are, such as cmaidad. Is it possible to to use these HP utilities to monitor for disk crashes (similar to smartd)? Is anyone using native HP utilities for this purpose?

The only HP tool I found useful was hpacucli, which is an SmartArray management tool, I think for only the Smart controllers, (e.g. not the cheap shit SATA controllers). You could detect drive failures and predictive failures etc. Though for some stupid reason at least as of the last time I used the tool you could not force a drive off line or force a drive to fail. I recall 2 problems in particular where the drive was failing and causing lots of I/O problems on the system but we had to send someone out on site to remove the disk, the controller wouldn't mark it as completely bad(it said it was about to fail). HP support claimed perhaps an updated firmware would of fixed that particular behavior (DL360 G4p class system with a SmartArray 6404 PCI-X RAID controller).

The bonus with hpacucli is you don't need any special drivers to get it to work, it uses the same drivers that the controller does. I'm really not fond of installing vendor specific drivers on top of my systems for monitoring purposes, maybe I'm paranoid but I don't have a lot of faith in them.

Unlike the Dell raid management tool which needs a bunch of RPMs installed and drivers etc(at least from what I've seen, and I've had it crash at least one model of dell system very reliably within seconds of running it).

iLO 2 can give quite a bit of hardware info as well, tons more than iLO 1 could, though it is web based. You may be able to access the iLO 2 event logs through OpenIPMI.

You could install the support tools for HP Systems Insight manager, though as mentioned above it has a lot of drivers and packages to support. I installed the agents recently on a VMWare ESX system just to see what it could do(since the agent was specifically for ESX), but at least under ESX the DL580G1 I was testing it on really didn't give anything useful.

nate