Adding SMART support to FreeBSD


I first ran across smartmontools about a year ago, and like to install it on all of the systems I manage. This helps me understand the current health of the hard drives in the servers and desktops I manage, and allows me to predict when disk drives are about to fail (this of course assumes that declining attributes are good indicators). Since I am using FreeBSD 6.0 on my personal laptop, I wanted to get smartmontools and smartd working. This was easily accomplished by first installing the smartmontools package with the pkg_add utility:

$ pkg_get -r smartmontools

And secondly by adding a smartd_enable line to /etc/rc.conf to start the SMART daemon (smartd) at system boot time:

$ grep smartd /etc/rc.conf
smartd_enable="YES”

I really dig the FreeBSD ports tree.

This article was posted by Matty on 2006-02-12 14:54:00 -0400 -0400