[smartmontools-support] using smartd to monitor a rotating group of USB drives?

[Nathan Stratton Treadway]

On Sun, Nov 04, 2018 at 19:51:32 +0100, Christian Franke wrote:
> Nathan Stratton Treadway wrote:
> >...
> >(We've been trying this out using smartmontools 6.5+svn4324-1 as found
> >in the Bionic release of Ubuntu.)
> >
> >Of course we looked at the the "-d removable" option lines in
> >smartd.conf... but that doesn't seem to apply DEVICESCAN-detected
> >devices.
> >
> >In any case, we're running into the following issues in our scenario:
> >
> >A) we get "SMART error (FailedOpenDevice) detected" warning messages
> >    each time a drive is unplugged, repeated daily until some new drive
> >    is plugged in and takes over the old /dev/sdX device name.
> 
> This should be fixed since r4399. This fix is included in
> smartmontools 6.6 (released ~1 year ago).

Yes, thanks, this looks very promising.

Just to be clarify, am I correct that 

  1) before this change "-d removable" had no effect on devices detected
     by DEVICESCAN (i.e. that option only affected what happened when an
     explicitly-listed device could not be opened at smartd.conf-parse-
     time), but

  2) after this change the new "runtime" functionality will apply to
     scan-detected devices (as long as "-d removable" is given on the
     DEVICESCAN line or on an earlier DEFAULT line)?

Due to the other issues with monitoring a rotating group of external
drives, it doesn't seem worth trying to find or build a backported
version of v6.6 right now, but I will keep this new functionality in
mind once we start upgrading to Ubuntu releases which include v6.6.

							Nathan

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