Here is part two in the series about our upgrade of wumple.com to Fedora Core 6 from Fedora Core 2. This upgrade was precipitated by the closing of the Fedora Legacy project and thus there is no hope of security updates for FC2.
Part 2 features networking and SMART hard drive health monitoring via smartd.
Networking:
wumple.com’s networking config files were moved aside by the upgrade, so it was trying to use DHCP instead of the static IP address for eth0 (the internal network interface) and was not even trying to bring up eth1 (the external network interface). Restoring the networking settings to /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 (from ifcfg-eth0.bak) and bringing the interface up with "/sbin/ifup eth0" fixed the problem.
The iptables rules only needed a minor tweak to work (a change in my configuration rather than Fedora). The ethernet interfaces eth0 and eth1 were luckily assigned in the order I wanted, otherwise I’d have needed to edit the assignment in /etc/modules.conf.
SMART and hard drive monitoring:
Hard drive health monitoring using SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) was not functioning on startup. smartd’s (from smartmontools) configuration file /etc/smartd.conf defaults to a single IDE drive, /dev/hda/, instead of detecting the drives in the system (a suggested improvement if any smartmontools or Fedora developers are reading this post).
The machine is contains a three SATA drive software RAID array (see last post for more details). Luckily libata (the kernel’s newer SATA driver) recently added the ATA passthrough support that smartd needed to function.
I disabled /dev/hda monitoring and added the following lines to /etc/smartd.conf:
/dev/sda -a -d ata -m root
/dev/sdb -a -d ata -m root
/dev/sdc -a -d ata -m root
"-m root" is important since it tells smartd to email root whenever it detects a hard disk issue (though make sure root’s email goes to a real user whose email you read frequently). "-d ata" is needed so smartd uses libata passthrough to communicate with the hard drives.
The following article was very helpful when configuring smartd: Monitoring Hard Disks with SMART by Bruce Allen in Linux Journal.
Stay tuned for part 3 to read about apcupsd UPS monitoring and yum and system updates.
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