ZFS Reporting (on FreeBSD and Linux via ZoL)

Question

As a longtime mdadm user is was just experiencing a disk error and remembered that I configured a Auto Mail reporting for mdadm on disk errors.

Therefore i just had to insert my Mail address inside /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

MAILADDR [email protected]

But I really missed that one out on FreeBSD. And as my ZFS RAID6 is now running over half a year i thought of what would happen if a disk would experience a failure?

I never configured any external mail address. Is there an easy way to accomplish and test this?

Like on mdadm:

sudo mdadm –monitor –scan –test

And how would i do it on Linux with ZoL (ZFS on Linux)?

EDIT: Sorry i meant AUTOMATED Reporting. not scheduled.

I know i could have build a script and parse zpool status -X every minute. but I think this is not a very elegant approach of accomplishing the reporting problem. It would be better to be notified instantly on a disk failure (like mdadm)

EDIT[2]: Thank you for your advices, but no im stuck with some scripting issues, fould someone help me with my for loop problem in /bin/sh here -> PASTEBIN

EDIT[3]: Got my for loop problem. :) (update in PASTEBIN)

Any more advices for my script?

Answer 1

Run a regular script (cron) that checks zpool status -x output. Longer-term, the ZFS on Linux project is working towards this in the form of an event daemon. The Solaris-derived systems had access to the Fault Management Architecture.

As far as automated reports, even commercial solutions like NexentaStor use scheduled checks. There's nothing wrong with that.

---

Something like this:

[root@mdmarra ~]# zpool status -x
all pools are healthy

Versus something awful like:

[root@mdmarra ~]# zpool status -x
  pool: vol1
 state: UNAVAIL
status: One or more devices are faulted in response to IO failures.
action: Make sure the affected devices are connected, then run 'zpool clear'.
   see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-JQ
 scan: scrub repaired 0 in 1h15m with 0 errors on Sun Jul 28 21:15:10 2013
config:

        NAME          STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        vol1          UNAVAIL      0     0     0  insufficient replicas
          mirror-0    DEGRADED     0     0     0
            c1t0d0    UNAVAIL      0     0     0  cannot open
            c2t0d0    ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-1    DEGRADED     0     0     0
            c1t1d0    UNAVAIL      0     0     0  cannot open
            c2t1d0    ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-2    DEGRADED     0     0     0
            spare-0   UNAVAIL      0     0     0  insufficient replicas
              c1t2d0  UNAVAIL      0     0     0  cannot open
              c2t8d0  UNAVAIL      0     0     0  cannot open
            c2t2d0    ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-3    DEGRADED     0     0     0
            c1t3d0    UNAVAIL      0     0     0  cannot open
            c2t3d0    ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-4    DEGRADED     0     0     0
            c1t4d0    UNAVAIL      0     0     0  cannot open
            c2t4d0    ONLINE       0     0     0
          mirror-5    UNAVAIL      0     0     0  insufficient replicas
            c1t5d0    UNAVAIL      0     0     0  cannot open
            c2t5d0    FAULTED      0     0     0  too many errors
        cache
          c3t5d0      ONLINE       0     0     0
        spares
          c2t8d0      UNAVAIL   cannot open

errors: No known data errors

Answer 2

Try zfswatcher, it works really well for me.