# Q: How to get notified of disk failure of hardware RAID?

## solamour

I have a server with something called "PERC H710 Adapter RAID Controller", which (I believe) is a hardware RAID interface. I went into the BIOS screen and set it up as RAID-5, and I didn't use LVM.

Is there a way to find out whether one of the disks has gone bad? When something goes wrong, the lights on the disks change from green to orange, but the server is currently stored in the server room, so I can't keep my eyes on it. I contacted the server vendor but there was no help, because Gentoo isn't an OS they support. I'd appreciate any suggestions.

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solLast edited by solamour on Fri Oct 05, 2012 5:00 am; edited 1 time in total

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## John R. Graham

I've always been able to find a utilities package for every hardware RAID controller I've used. The utility outputs status and, when run from a script launched by a cron job, can make a decision to email me if there's an issue. Works like a charm.  :Wink: 

- John

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## DONAHUE

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools#Advanced:_Running_as_Smartmontools_as_a_Daemon

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## John R. Graham

I don't believe that SMART and hardware RAID status are the same thing.

- John

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## Deathwing00

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Kernel & Hardware.

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## Mad Merlin

The PERC H200 controller will let you query the SMART status directly with smartctl. IIRC, you should have /dev/sg\d+ devices for each drive which you can query, each one maps to one of the underlying drives. I would assume the H710 is similar.

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## solamour

I finally got around trying out "smartctl", but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be compatible with what I have.

```
# smartctl -i /dev/sda

smartctl version 5.38 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen

Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Device: DELL PERC H700 Version: 2.10

Serial number: 0091e6330702841817003ba47a20e54a

Device type: disk

Local Time is: Fri Oct 12 13:36:11 2012 PDT

Device does not support SMART

# cat /proc/partitions

major minor  #blocks  name

   8        0 4098490368 sda

   8        1       1024 sda1

   8        2     249856 sda2

   8        3 4098237440 sda3

 251        0 4025798656 dm-0

 251        1   72437760 dm-1

```

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sol

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## John R. Graham

Yeah, like I said, SMART != RAID management. A little Googling determined that the package for Perc RAID controllers is Dell OpenManage. There's a Debian package here, so you'll have some work setting it up under Gentoo. I wasn't able to find any existing ebuild.

- John

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## krinn

Smart as nothing to do with managing raid. You need a raid managing tools.

And because the raid array is not a disk, smartctrl fail on it. But your raid tools should provide smart capability.

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## John R. Graham

Hey, that krinn guy is smart. You should listen to him!  :Wink: 

- John

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## krinn

You're crazy JRG  :Smile: 

(adaptec user look for arcconf)

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## Mad Merlin

 *solamour wrote:*   

> I finally got around trying out "smartctl", but unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be compatible with what I have.
> 
> ```
> # smartctl -i /dev/sda
> 
> ...

 

Do you have any /dev/sg* devices? See my post above.

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## solamour

There are a few /dev/sg*, but again, I think I'm looking at the wrong direction.

```
$ ls -l /dev/sg*

crw-rw---- 1 root cdrom 21, 0 2012-08-30 09:36 /dev/sg0

crw-rw---- 1 root root  21, 1 2012-08-30 09:36 /dev/sg1

crw-rw---- 1 root disk  21, 2 2012-08-30 09:36 /dev/sg2

# sudo smartctl -i /dev/sg1

smartctl version 5.38 [x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen

Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Device: DP       BACKPLANE        Version: 1.09

Device type: enclosure

Local Time is: Mon Oct 15 09:29:24 2012 PDT

Device does not support SMART

```

As mentioned by JRG, Dell's OpenManage Server Administrator looks promising, but the Dell support wasn't exactly helpful, because I'm not using the Linux distro they are supporting. I'll do some more digging and report the progress.

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sol

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## John R. Graham

I wouldn't've expected any help from Dell. I didn't get any help from Adaptec either but there is an ebuild for their older controllers in Portage (sys-apps/raidutils) which I've helped maintain. krinn's right about the newer ones: I made an (as yet unsubmitted) ebuild for arcconf which supports their newer cards. Both work very well under Gentoo.

- John

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