[nycbug-talk] fave BSD tips/tricks?

[Charles Sprickman]

On Mon, 24 Aug 2009, George Rosamond wrote:

> RAID STATUSES DAILY
>
> I get lots of dailies. . . and always add the following to cron on its own: 
> status of RAIDs on the local box.  Every blob or BSD software raid solution 
> has its 'status' check, and seeing an email specific on that makes me sleep 
> better.

That's a good one.

For gmirror, at some point this file showed up in /etc/periodic/daily:

/etc/periodic/daily/406.status-gmirror

Which is activated by setting daily_status_gmirror_enable="YES" in 
/etc/periodic.conf.

Actually, just looking through /etc/defaults/periodic.conf is handy as 
well.  You can combine your daily and security emails into one, turn off 
checks that you don't need (ie: the r* checks), and basically trim your 
daily reports down to something more manageable.

Back to RAID, some cards, like the LSI stuff in Dells that use the mpt 
driver have no utility to manage or check the status.  But there is some 
info on "non-optimal volumes" available in the sysctl output.  Some other 
drivers with no management software may do the same.

Regardless, here's a silly shell script I dumped in 
/usr/local/etc/periodic/daily to put RAID status in my daily emails:

----
#!/bin/sh

# show number of non-optimal drives attached to mpt raid card

NONOPT=`/sbin/sysctl -n dev.mpt.0.nonoptimal_volumes`

echo
echo "Checking MPT RAID array"
echo

if [ $NONOPT -eq 0 ]; then
         echo "No non-optimal volumes: ($NONOPT)"
elif [ $NONOPT -ne 0 ]; then
         echo "WARNING, $NONOPT non-optimal volumes!"
fi
----
Charles

>
> g
>