security policies? - Re: New DiskMonitoring package

[Brian Sutherland]

On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 12:45:13PM +0200, H. C. Brugmans wrote:
> This looks like a package I would want to have installed, but the 
> instructions/status of te package seem not very clear to me.

The status is that it is a prototype, to see if the concepts involved
are reasonable. That means that is doesn't do a lot of things it should
in an automatic way, mostly because I don't want to bother until I get
some positive feedback. (Hint: If the powers that be were to say
something, that would be definitive)

Personally, I believe that the feature set should remain small, but here
are some of the ones I am thinking of adding:

* Message spooling, so that messages sent when the user is not logged in
  are not lost
* Some kind of message filtering to tune the messages which get
  displayed
* All of the stuff to make it "just work" with no file
  editing/configuration needed.

> Is there a wikipage or anything where there is some info about this and 
> a little howto to get it working?

This thread should contain all the information, but here is a step by
step guide:

* install the packages (both the modified smartmontools and
  smart-notifier)
* edit /etc/default/smartmontools un-commenting the start_smartd=yes line
* add /usr/bin/smart-notifier to your gnome session
    (System -> Preferences -> Sessions -> Startup Programs)
* Restart (not strictly necessary, but easier to explain)

Then, to test it:

* edit /etc/smartd.conf and add "-M test" to the configuration line,
  this will cause smartd to send a test message on each restart. The
  line should look something like:
    DEVICESCAN -m root -M test -M exec /usr/bin/smartd-runner
* running `sudo /etc/init.d/smartmontools restart` should cause a fake
  warning message window to pop up.

-- 
Brian Sutherland

It's 10 minutes, 5 if you walk fast.