How does gmirror know of a faulty drive

[John Nielsen]

On Wednesday 14 February 2007 15:10, Brian A. Seklecki wrote:
> On Wed, 27 Jul 2005, Ivan Carey wrote:
> > In FreeBSD 5.3 I have set up 2 drives in RAID-1 format.
> > How will I know if one of the drives is faulty such as either not working
> > or
> >
> > has some lost sectors?
> >
> > Is it possible to have gmirror email me if there is a problem?
>
> I just actually replied to a thread about this.  Apparently there is no
> automatic demotion of a device to DEGRADED.  I just had a provider error
> for a good 5 minutes of SCSI kernel messages (bad sectors, grown defects),
> without any automatic corrective action taken by gmirror(4)

In my experience gmirror will automatically detach any consumer that has a 
hard read or write error. (I haven't had occasion to use gmirror with SCSI 
devices yet though, so this could just be limited to ATA.)

Re: e-mail notification, you can get a daily report if you 
set 'daily_status_gmirror_enable="YES"' in /etc/periodic.conf. If you'd like 
more frequent checks it wouldn't be hard to put a script together to 
run "gmirror status" every N minutes from cron, parse the output and forward 
it to you if it said anything but COMPLETE for each provider.

JN