smartd blows away mfi config

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

I have a Dell PowerEdge 1950 II with a PERC/5i controller and two SATA
disks.  I had no trouble at all setting up logical volumes with mfiutil
and installing FreeBSD 8.2, but when smartd starts (with smartd.conf
consisting only of "DEVICESCAN") it seems to blow away the config so the
virtual disks disappear from underneath the running system and I have to
powercycle the machine.  When the machine reboots, the controller does
not find any logical disks.  The configuration utility finds a "foreign
configuration" which I can import, and there doesn't seem to be any data
missing.

This does not seem to happen if I specify the passX devices explicitly
in smartd.conf - only if I use DEVICESCAN.  This indicates that the
problem arises when smartd scans the SES device (i.e. the backplane).
The problem is that the unit numbers can vary over time, e.g. if I add
an optical drive or boot the system with a USB mass storage device
attached, so listing them explicitly is not a good long-term solution.

Any suggestions?  The ideal solution would be a patch for either the
kernel or smartd to prevent it from blowing away the mfi config, but
short of that, is there a way to have smartd ignore the backplane when
scanning for supported devices?  A drivedb entry, perhaps?  As a last
resort, I guess I could regnerate smartd.conf at boot time by parsing
dmesg and / or the cam device list.

Note that I am running 8.2-RELEASE and the version of smartmontools that
ships with it, or rather, what pkg_add -r gives me (which I guess is the
same thing).

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no