coldtobi's blog

• Main
• Archives
• Albums
• Links
• Admin

• Blog and Website [88]
• DSL RAM [2]
• Electronics and Atmel AVR [10]
• fanctrl [3]
• General [8]
• German [1]
• La Fonera [28]
• Lifetype [17]
• Linux / Debian [31]
• Monetizing A Blog [8]
• my 2 cents [19]
• Netzfunde [17]
• Nice Links [1]
• solarpowerlog [1]
• Thecus N2100 [15]
• Tips and Tricks [18]

• Configure lighttp to simulate .htaccess rules (Deny From All)
• WoW Money Laundering?
• Samba: No mount as user.
• Nice Links #1 -- How hardrives works and how they do recovery
• Squirrelmail and lighttpd -- An Installation Guide --
• Link Crosscompiling
• git cheat sheet

• RSS 0.90
• RSS 1.0
• RSS 2.0
• Atom

• Privacy Policy
• Disclosure Policy

smartmontools on SATA

I had an annoying problem with my smartmontools. The startup script kept telling me, that it fails upon starting. Well, this was annoying but not critical.

But now that there is a new smartmontools package upstream, this discovered a bug: After installation, smartmontools barks in its postinst script as it fails to start. (See bugreport) 

Well, this was definitely are reason to investigate why it fails in the first place. As maybe someone other has the same problem, I want to document this:

Issuing a manual smartctl -d /dev/sda gave me the hint:

smartd version 5.37 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Opened configuration file /etc/smartd.conf
Drive: DEVICESCAN, implied '-a' Directive on line 22 of file /etc/smartd.conf
Configuration file /etc/smartd.conf was parsed, found DEVICESCAN, scanning devices
glob(3) found no matches for pattern /dev/hd[a-t]
glob(3) aborted matching pattern /dev/discs/disc*
Problem creating device name scan list
Device: /dev/sda, opened
Device /dev/sda: ATA disk detected behind SAT layer
  Try adding '-d sat' to the device line in the smartd.conf file.
  For example: '/dev/sda -a -d sat'
Unable to register SCSI device /dev/sda at line 22 of file /etc/smartd.conf
Unable to monitor any SMART enabled devices. Try debug (-d) option. Exiting...

So I checked /etc/default/smartmontools and added the -a -d sat to the enable_smart variable. Unfortutatly, that won't work, so the place to edit is etc/smartd.conf: 

Here, I disabled the "automatic" devicescan mode and manually added my drive:

#DEVICESCAN -m root -M exec /usr/share/smartmontools/smartd-runner
/dev/sda -a -d sat

And then it works like a charm...