3ware SMART (was: [plug] 2.4.24 mremap root exploit)

[Craig Ringer]

I just ran into something that's likely to be very useful to anyone else
with one of these 3ware controllers. From drivers/scsi/3w-xxxx.c:

   1.02.00.037 - Fix tw_ioctl() to handle all non-data ATA passthru cmds
                 for 'smartmontools' support.

Sure enough, with the latest smartmontools (
http://smartmontools.sf.net/ ) one can perform S.M.A.R.T queries via the
controller, using special ioctls to pass raw ATA commands to the disks.
For example:

------------------------------------------------------------
# smartctl -d 3ware,0 -H -a /dev/sda

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     ST380023AS
Serial Number:    3KB15ZGD
Firmware Version: 3.01
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   6
ATA Standard is:  ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 2
Local Time is:    Thu Feb 19 09:22:03 2004 WST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
Please note the following marginal Attributes:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE     
UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   046   029   030    Pre-fail 
Always   In_the_past 12210694348507
------------------------------------------------------------

Replace 3ware,0 with 3ware,1 etc to get subsequent disks on the
controller. Oddly, it seems to work controller-wide not per-array, so if
3ware,0 /dev/sdb is the same as 3ware,0 /dev/sda .

Anyway, I hope this benefits someone. I spent quite a bit of time asking
3ware if they could do this (having had a rash of SMART-detectable disk
failures) and got repeatedly fobbed off. Since then they've added the
ability to hot add/remove arrays and now this monitoring feature.

Craig Ringer