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chibby

Member

Registered: 2012-07-10

Posts: 19

[SOLVED] smartmontools keep my drives spinning??

Hi!

One SSD and 4 HDDs (RAID5) in my system. I configured the HDDs with hdparm to spindown after half an hour --> works!

Now i wanted to monitor the RAID's health using smartmontools.
But installing smartmontools keep my drives from spinning down! - Why??
I didn't activate the smartd systemd service and didn't issue any selftest commands.. Still they don't spin down.

please help,
Peter

Last edited by chibby (2013-11-11 19:59:51)

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: [SOLVED] smartmontools keep my drives spinning??

run this command:

$ man 5 smartd.conf 

stqn

Member

Registered: 2010-03-19

Posts: 1,191

Website

Re: [SOLVED] smartmontools keep my drives spinning??

How will looking at the (very long) man page of smartd help if it’s not even running in the first place?

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: [SOLVED] smartmontools keep my drives spinning??

Well, that begs the question of how you know that smartmontools is keeping your drive spinning? 

Looking at the man page will give you info on how the program works.  Since you suspect that this is what is causing your issue... why wouldn't you read the documentation?!

chibby

Member

Registered: 2012-07-10

Posts: 19

Re: [SOLVED] smartmontools keep my drives spinning??

run this command:

$ man 5 smartd.conf 

didn't find a clue in there ..

any other suggestions?

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: [SOLVED] smartmontools keep my drives spinning??

Assuming that you view man pages in the default pager (less), once you open the man page, hit '/' then type 'POWERMODE'

chibby

Member

Registered: 2012-07-10

Posts: 19

Re: [SOLVED] smartmontools keep my drives spinning??

ahm .. yes .. that describes the configuration of the daemon .. WHICH IS NOT RUNNING!

i bet it's some other daemon/application calling smartctl or s/t..
just that nothing shows up in logfiles saying "smart".

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: [SOLVED] smartmontools keep my drives spinning??

ahm .. yes .. that describes the configuration of the daemon .. WHICH IS NOT RUNNING!

Whoa!  Calm down.

When you open a thread and say that package X is causing Y behavior.  It is only logical to seek a solution in package X's configuration.  You have done nothing to explain why you think that smartmontools is causing your disk to keep spinning.  So unless there is some explanation of how you have come to that conclusion, the only thing that is logical to suggest is that you properly configure smartmontools.

Have you actually tried to uninstall smartmontools and see if the problem persists?  I have to guess that while you think that it is smartd that is causing this, it could very well be something entirely different.

chibby

Member

Registered: 2012-07-10

Posts: 19

Re: [SOLVED] smartmontools keep my drives spinning??

When you open a thread and say that package X is causing Y behavior.  It is only logical to seek a solution in package X's configuration.  You have done nothing to explain why you think that smartmontools is causing your disk to keep spinning.  So unless there is some explanation of how you have come to that conclusion, the only thing that is logical to suggest is that you properly configure smartmontools.

Have you actually tried to uninstall smartmontools and see if the problem persists?  I have to guess that while you think that it is smartd that is causing this, it could very well be something entirely different.

Sry - didn't mean to offend you.

Please read my 1st post again. Maybe i should have described it more detailed:
Installing smartmontools cause HDDs to keep spinning --> uninstalling smartmontools restores spindown-functionality. (reproduceable)

So i don't know what else installing them does, except for placing some files. I didn't find any cron-jobs or other means by which they might get run.

I'm pretty sure it's something entirely different (something calling smartctl/..).
Yet i don't know of any methods, how to detect the calling of an executeable (whoa .. hope that's understandable ).

chibby

Member

Registered: 2012-07-10

Posts: 19

Re: [SOLVED] smartmontools keep my drives spinning??

i guess i found something!

using

# iotop -abo -d 0.4 -t -qqq |grep -v -E 'python|jbd|syslog|kworker|journald'

i found out that smartctl is called every few minutes .. by webmin!

20:45:49 21085 be/4 root          0.00 B      4.00 K  0.00 %  0.00 % perl /opt/webmin-1.660/miniserv.pl /etc/webmin/miniserv.conf
20:45:49 25645 be/4 root          0.00 B      0.00 B  0.00 % 99.99 % smartctl -n standby -a /dev/sdb

i then investigated the SMART module in webmin .. it says nothing about periodic calling - but i was able to specify additional arguments to the smartctl call.
adding

-n standby

solved the problem!

thanks for staying with me

EDIT:
had to disable background collection of drive temps too. the above won't spin up a sleeping drive .. but it keeps active drives spinning!
Webmin -> Webmin Configuration -> Background Status Collection

Last edited by chibby (2013-11-11 22:12:50)

graysky

Wiki Maintainer

From: :wq

Registered: 2008-12-01

Posts: 10,597

Website

Re: [SOLVED] smartmontools keep my drives spinning??

Glad you got it solved.  Uninstall webmin

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