blog.saalmink.nl

After swapping a couple of defective harddisks, i was wondering why i never got a predictive failure from my Areca controller.
The weird thing is: the logging shows warnings:

2014-08-24 23:15:37  IDE Channel #08  Reading Error
2014-08-24 23:15:28  IDE Channel #08  Reading Error
2014-08-24 23:15:19  IDE Channel #08  Reading Error
2014-08-24 23:15:10  IDE Channel #08  Reading Error

However.. the controller doesn’t seem to do anything with the s.m.a.r.t. values.
Here’s a script you might want to use as a base to get your monitoring up and running.

#!/bin/bash

CLI="/path/to/cli32"

NR_OF_PORTS=`$CLI disk info | wc -l`
# subtract 4 to get rid of the formatting and determine the real number of disks
NR_OF_PORTS=`expr $NR_OF_PORTS - 4`
echo "Controller has $NR_OF_PORTS ports"

for (( i=1; i<=$NR_OF_PORTS; i++ ))
do
  RELOC_SECT=`$CLI disk smart drv=$i | grep "Reallocated Sector Count" | awk '{print $9}'`
  if [ -z "$RELOC_SECT" ]; then
    echo "Port $i = No Disk"
  else
    echo "Port $i = $RELOC_SECT"
  fi
done

Quest active directory powershell module has this nice property for user and computer objects: ParentContainer
Microsoft’s native ActiveDirectory module doesn’t.
I’m using this property a lot because it looks much more friendly than the CanonicalName.
Here’s a simple function to achieve the same.

function CanonicalName_to_ParentContainer ($cname)
{
  try
  { 
    $lastslash = $cname.lastindexof("/")
    $cname.substring(0,$lastslash)
  }
  catch
  {
    $cname
  }
}

My lifesaver:

create and chmod +x the file:

/etc/grub.d/15_Windows

Add this code:

#! /bin/sh -e
echo "Adding Windows" >&2
cat << EOF
menuentry "Windows" {
set root=(hd0,1)
chainloader +1
}
EOF

for grub2:

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub2.cfg

or:

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

By default, powershell uses your regional settings. So when importing data from external files, a simple get-date or typecast to [DateTime] does not always give the correct value.
With the template below, you can interpret any format.

PS> $timeinfo = '12 07 2012 18 02'
PS> $template = 'HH mm yyyy dd MM'
PS> [DateTime]::ParseExact($timeinfo, $template, $null) 
Samstag, 18. Februar 2012 12:07:00

Values can be:

d     Day of month 1-31
dd    Day of month 01-31
ddd   Day of month as abbreviated weekday name
dddd  Weekday name
h     Hour from 1-12
H     Hour from 1-24
hh    Hour from 01-12
HH    Hour from 01-24
m     Minute from 0-59
mm    Minute from 00-59
M     Month from 1-12
MM    Month from 01-12
MMM   Abbreviated Month Name
MMMM  Month name
s     Seconds from 1-60
ss    Seconds from 01-60
t     A or P (for AM or PM)
tt    AM or PM
yy    Year as 2-digit
yyyy  Year as 4-digit
z     Timezone as one digit
zz    Timezone as 2-digit
zzz   Timezone