Re: mdadm mail option configuration

At 08:53 AM 30/05/2002 +1000, Neil Brown wrote:

On Wednesday May 29, jhill@hrpost.com wrote:

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Then, I just have an init script that runs:
      /sbin/mdadm -Fs --delay=600 &

Why 600 (10 minutes)?? I would suggest 60seconds for normal operation
and 1 second for testing.

Okay, changed. My choice was arbitrary, just assumed it would be
reasonable -- I'm moving it on to a heavily loaded production server
and the e-mail isn't constantly monitored so I assumed . . . .

You assumed what?  Are you thinking that it wil send mail every $delay
seconds if there is a problem, and you didn't want to be spammed?

No, I assumed there was no reason to add additional polling. If there is no 
one around to read the e-mail, there seemed no reason to add to the number 
of processes being run on a heavily loaded server. I expect the load of 
polling is miniscule, but it all adds something.

Mdadm only sends mail when it notices a drive fail, not when it
notices that a drive is failed.
i.e. if on one poll the drive is working, and on the next poll the
drive is not working, then it sends mail saying "The drive just
failed".

So when you were testing, was "mdadm -Fs" actually running at the
moment when you simulated a drive failure?

I certainly thought it was, but unfortunately I wasn't simulating. When I 
saw that all of the partitions on sdb had been kicked out of the array, I 
saw that mdadm -Fs was running, but the drive could have failed before a 
reboot when mdadm might not have been running. When you confirmed that my 
configuration was generally correct, I assumed that mdadm wasn't running or 
that I had done something else wrong. When I can get the system running 
again (lilo is hosed; looking at grub for boot raid?), I'll test and 
promise to e-mail back.

Regards,

Jeff Hill