Disk monitoring

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 01:58:54AM -0500, Todd Troxell wrote:

> I just had a thought about usability and hard disks.
> 
> Things we know:
> -IDE disks die, a lot.
> -Sometimes they start getting read errors before they die completely.
> -Joe user probably doesn't have backups.
> 
> I am not sure *how* to do it, but it seems we should alert users in a
> friendly way that their hard disk may be about to spin it's last, detectable
> by scanning the logs for read/media errors.
> 
> Maybe a notification area applet for tracking general system ailments?  I 
> imagine there is other stuff in the logs worth harvesting.

The best answer to this is to use SMART to monitor the disks.  There is
software for this in universe, but it would need some work to have it
integrated properly "out of the box".

This was on the list of proposed goals for Hoary, but no one expressed
interest in working on it.  If anyone reading this would like to work on
such a project for the next release, contact me.

-- 
 - mdz