[CentOS] how to control Hard Drive light from Linux?

Sun Jan 23 15:48:45 UTC 2011
Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at SoftDux.com>

On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 6:21 AM, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 5:03 PM, Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at softdux.com> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Does anyone know how to control a hard drive light from Linux? I'm
>> building a 24bay Linux File server which will run software RAID and I
>> need an easy way for the engineers to see which HDD has gone bad.
>>
>> Most of our NAS devices has 2 lights on the hard drive cages and they
>> automatically signal a bad one (reg light, light constant on , etc)
>> but I can't figure out how todo this from Linux.
>
> That's because they have hardware RAID, with that built in at the
> hardware itself, the drivers designed for that chassis, and the
> management tools for it. Unpeeling that to say "make it work on
> Linux!" would be unfair: we couldn't make a good guess without knowing
> the actual *hardware* of your Linux File Server. And we can't even
> guess what the available displays of your drive enclosure are.

Nope. Many NAS devices don't have hardware RAID, especially those
which allow you to change the RAID level from a web interface. They
also mostly run Linux, or BSD (very few run Windows. And many SAS
expanders have 2 light for each drive: power & activity.

I need to know how to manipulate either of those, to make it appear
differently from it's normal stats so that the on-site tech's know
there's a drive fault.


>
> Why are you doing this when a commercial solution with such featurs,
> equipped with 1 TB drives, costs less than $10,000 with all these
> goodies and the superior performance of hardware RAID thrown in?

Check again. Many of those solutions don't actually have hardware RAID
in the price. We've been down this road already.

And, I'm tired of:
1. vendon lock-ins
2. vendor limitation cause they want to milk more out of you than necessary.
3. 40 -70% import duties on those devices in our country.
4. vendors who feel you should have storage the way they like it, not
the way you like it.
5. vendor "expert technicians" who don't even know how to setup their
own equipment properly.




-- 
Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers
SoftDux

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