smartmontools

The smartmontools package contains two utility programs (smartctl and smartd) to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI harddisks. In many cases, these utilities will provide advanced warning of disk degradation and failure. (The above shamelessly taken from the supplied URL).

I just installed it:

cd /usr/ports/sysutils/smartmontools/ && make install clean

Then I set up the configuration file, with default values:

cp -i /usr/local/etc/smartd.conf.sample /usr/local/etc/smartd.conf

And for smartd to run at boot:

echo 'smartd_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf

And started smartd:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/smartd start

Then I added this to /etc/periodic.conf to add drive health information to my daily status reports:

daily_status_smart_devices="/dev/ad8 /dev/ad10 /dev/ad12 /dev/ad14 /dev/ad16 /dev/ad24"

I also added a Nagios plugin for interfacing with SMART:

 cd /usr/ports/net-mgmt/nagios-check_smartmon/ && make install clean

But there is a problem with this tool:

[root@kraken /usr/local/libexec/nagios]# ./check_smartmon -d /dev/ad8
./check_smartmon:114: DeprecationWarning: os.popen3 is deprecated.  Use the subprocess module.
  (child_stdin, child_stdout, child_stderr) = os.popen3(cmd)
./check_smartmon:127: DeprecationWarning: os.popen3 is deprecated.  Use the subprocess module.
  (child_stdin, child_stdout, child_stderr) = os.popen3(cmd)
OK: device is functional and stable (temperature: 33)

The last line of the output is appropriate. The preamble is not. This won’t work with Nagios until it is fixed.