mdadm and email warnings

mdadm and email warnings

[AndyLiebman]

Can anybody point me to information/how-tos that describe, step-by-step, how 
to configure mdadm to give me warnings about possible problems with my raid 
arrays? I realize that mdadm can monitor the status of the raids and send me a 
warning if something looks bad. But I'm fuzzy on how exactly to set this up. 
Sorry, but the details aren't obvious from any of the manuals or help files. 

For instance, I see that I can enter an email address with the flag -m and 
the address. But do I need to specify a program that will send that email? It 
looks that way to me. Can I use KDE Mail to do the job? Or do I need to use 
something that doesn't involve a GUI? 

Thanks in advance for the help

Andy Liebman

Re: mdadm and email warnings

[Måns Rullgård]

AndyLiebman@aol.com writes:

> Can anybody point me to information/how-tos that describe,
> step-by-step, how to configure mdadm to give me warnings about
> possible problems with my raid arrays? I realize that mdadm can
> monitor the status of the raids and send me a warning if something
> looks bad. But I'm fuzzy on how exactly to set this up.  Sorry, but
> the details aren't obvious from any of the manuals or help files.
>
> For instance, I see that I can enter an email address with the flag
> -m and the address. But do I need to specify a program that will
> send that email? It looks that way to me. Can I use KDE Mail to do
> the job? Or do I need to use something that doesn't involve a GUI?

I run "mdadm --monitor --scan --daemonise" and have put a mail address
in mdadm.conf.  Make sure sendmail or something compatible
(e.g. postfix) is installed.

-- 
Måns Rullgård
mru@kth.se

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Re: mdadm and email warnings

[Neil Brown]

On Wednesday January 28, AndyLiebman@aol.com wrote:
> 
> For instance, I see that I can enter an email address with the flag -m and 
> the address. But do I need to specify a program that will send that email? It 
> looks that way to me. Can I use KDE Mail to do the job? Or do I need to use 
> something that doesn't involve a GUI? 

No, you don't need to specify a program to send the mail.  mdadm
already knows to use sendmail.
The --program option is to specify a program that can do other things
with alerts from mdadm.  e.g. log them, page a sysadmin, send a
differently formatted email. etc.

NeilBrown

Re: mdadm and email warnings

[AndyLiebman]

Thank you Neil. I guess my question is, can I invoke Mozilla mail or KMail or 
something that's easy to configure to get my warnings?

The "fileserver" that I want to monitor with mdadm isn't set up as a mail 
server. And, frankly, I'm completely baffled about how to configure sendmail to 
just act as an intermediary for sending and receiving mail from an outside 
Internet Service Provider. Is there a simple mail client -- even one that's just 
text based (Pine?) that's easy to configure so that it will work with mdadm? 
I'm not being lazy. I just don't want to become an expert in every aspect of 
Linux services just to run a local file server. 

Appreciate your thoughts. 

Andy Liebman

> 
> For instance, I see that I can enter an email address with the flag -m and 
> the address. But do I need to specify a program that will send that email? 
It 
> looks that way to me. Can I use KDE Mail to do the job? Or do I need to use 
> something that doesn't involve a GUI? 

No, you don't need to specify a program to send the mail.  mdadm
already knows to use sendmail.
The --program option is to specify a program that can do other things
with alerts from mdadm.  e.g. log them, page a sysadmin, send a
differently formatted email. etc.

NeilBrown