On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 02:19:17PM -0600, Edward Kuns wrote:

1) If I have bad blocks lists configured, how do I safely remove them?

--assemble with --update=no-bbl is safe, since it only removes if empty.
If not empty, likely you'll end up doing --update=force-no-bbl anyway.
 

# smartctl -l scterc,70,70 /dev/sdb ; echo $?
smartctl 6.5 2016-05-07 r4318 [x86_64-linux-4.8.13-100.fc23.x86_64]
(local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-16, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

SCT Commands not supported

0

It'd be hilarious if the timeout FUD on this list came with advice that 
didn't even do anything for most people, and nobody ever noticed...

Unfortunately, it returns 4 here. And there are years old posts that 
explicitely check for it returning 4, so this shouldn't be new at all.

Perhaps it's an intermittent error specific to your smartctl version?

You can just set the timeouts unconditionally, if you really want them.

Regards
Andreas Klauer