Logcheck devel - Jan 2007 - Bug#407734: logcheck-database: logcheck-rules shouldn't try to parse SMART values

Package: logcheck-database
Version: 1.2.52
Severity: normal

The first rule in violations.d/smartd tries to parse the SMART value
of attribute 194 (temperature) to see if it is below 55.

This behaviour isn't very sensible though - in a default installation
of smartmontools on Debian, smartd reports the normalized value for
all attributes in the logfile. The relation of normalized values to
the raw attribute is vendor-specific, so there is no sensible threshold
that logcheck could use (smartd can though, it knows the theshold
for failure set by the vendor).

In my case this misinterpretation means that I'll get a security violation
mail every time my hard drives change their temperature.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.16.37
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=de_DE (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages logcheck-database depends on:
ii  debconf [debconf-2.0]         1.5.11     Debian configuration management sy

logcheck-database recommends no packages.

-- debconf information:
* logcheck-database/rules-directories-note:
  logcheck-database/standard-rename-note:
  logcheck-database/conffile-cleanup: false

Hi,

on Sat, Jan 20, 2007 at 20:47:07 +0100, Ingo Korb wrote:
> This behaviour isn't very sensible though - in a default installation
> of smartmontools on Debian, smartd reports the normalized value for
> all attributes in the logfile. The relation of normalized values to
> the raw attribute is vendor-specific, so there is no sensible threshold
> that logcheck could use (smartd can though, it knows the theshold
> for failure set by the vendor).
Yet one would prefer to be warned about high temperature before
failure. ;)
While this in the past justified rules like this, smartmontools 5.37
added the -W switch allowing temperature tracking and warning to be
configured.

Due to this, I believe it is now fine to have rules ignoring all of
smartd's temperature messages and have the users that care about the
operation conditions of their drives configure smartd accordingly
instead.

elmar

-- 

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