[mythtv-users] Storage Questions. LVM, RAID, NFS

[David Rees]

On 5/1/06, Douglas Wagner <douglasw0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Without any special configuration MDADM is pretty silent.  Alot of
> distributions have some nightly e-mails going to root that might include
> mdadm information (typically a cat of /proc/mdstat), and I know there are
> some 3rd party tools that will monitor MDSTAT for you, but by and large
> you're pretty much on your own to my knowledge.

If on a RedHat/Fedora system, you can make sure that mdmonitor is
setup to run by using chkconfig. That will monitor your raid array for
any alerts.

Next thing to do is if you're using IDE or SATA discs is to use smartd
to run periodic SMART checks on each drive in the array. Configure
this in /etc/smartd.conf and again use chkconfig to make sure it's set
to start up on boot. smartd can scan some SCSI disks as well I think.

Also, you can schedule a parity check of the array by echoing "check"
to /sys/block/md<n>/md/sync_action. This will trigger a read-only
consistency check of the array which will exercise all disks in the
array. Set this up to run once a week during a time you're not likely
to be using the disks.

Finally, make sure you have logwatch installed. It will send out
nightly emails to the root user concerning the status of your machine.
Scan the emails for any oddities which might appear in a logfile.

-Dave