I eventually got round to installing SMART tools on my home Linux server, so now if one of the hard disks decides to start playing up or fails, I should get a nice little e-mail telling me there’s a problem. I’ve already set up e-mail on my server so I won’t go into how to set it up here, you can read all about it yourself on the Official Ubuntu Documentation pages.

First thing you need to do is install smarttools

sudo apt-get install smartmontools

Before configuring your hard disk(s) for SMART monitoring, make sure your hard disk is SMART capable:

sudo smartctl -i /dev/sda

You should get output similar to this

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

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: SAMSUNG HD154UI
Serial Number: S1XWJ1KZ209937
Firmware Version: 1AG01118
User Capacity: 1,500,301,910,016 bytes
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: 7
ATA Standard is: Not recognized. Minor revision code: 0x52
Local Time is: Wed Oct 27 10:49:28 2010 BST

> WARNING: May need -F samsung or -F samsung2 enabled; see manual for details.

SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

In the above output the lines:

SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

Indicates that it is SMART capable and it is enabled.

At this point you need to read the manual page and decide what you want smartctl to do for you, I initially set mine up to do a long test and a short test and upon finding any problems to e-mail me.

man smartd

man smartd.conf

Below is what was in my /etc/smartd.conf file, I used this to test smartd and ensure that the e-mail part was working correctly.

After I tested, I removed the “-M test“ part below.

/dev/sda -a -d sat -I 194 -m billy@my.email.address.uk -M test -s (S/../.././02|L/../../6/03)
/dev/sdb -a -d sat -I 194 -m billy@my.email.address.uk -M test -s (S/../.././02|L/../../6/03)

Below is the e-mail I received in my inbox from the smartd daemon.

After removing the “-M test” from /etc/smartd.conf, you would only get this e-mail if there was a genuine problem.

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

host name: orion
DNS domain: linuxhome.co.uk
NIS domain: (none)

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

TEST EMAIL from smartd for device: /dev/sda

For details see host's SYSLOG (default: /var/log/messages).

References:
Clarks Connect Website
Nixcraft Website
Linux Journal