smartd blows away mfi config

[Douglas Gilbert]

On 11-11-17 10:42 AM, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> 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).

Not sure how SES devices appear as device nodes (i.e. /dev entries)
in FreeBSD. If they can be mistaken for disks then smartd has
a problem which I will look into.

Doug Gilbert

> 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