Bug 277641
Summary: | Usability of important smartd messages | ||
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Product: | [Fedora] Fedora | Reporter: | Christopher Beland <beland> |
Component: | smartmontools | Assignee: | Tomas Smetana <tsmetana> |
Status: | CLOSED NOTABUG | QA Contact: | Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa> |
Severity: | low | Docs Contact: | |
Priority: | medium | ||
Version: | 7 | ||
Target Milestone: | --- | ||
Target Release: | --- | ||
Hardware: | i686 | ||
OS: | Linux | ||
Whiteboard: | |||
Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | |
Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |
Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
Last Closed: | 2007-09-17 11:44:23 UTC | Type: | --- |
Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
Embargoed: |
Description
Christopher Beland
2007-09-05 00:48:09 UTC
The action that smartd performs on error is configurable and the configuration is described in the documentation even with examples. You can configure smartd to use notify-send, but since smartmontools package is more important and useful on servers (it's going to be turned off by default in F-8) I have to assume there will be no user logged into GNOME. Then the only action that makes sense is to send an email to root. The manpages are browsable in yelp and I consider them to be really well written. Much better than I could do with my English... For users that don't even know enough to check root's email, it's not a viable solution to expect them to re-configure smartd to take some different action upon discovering a problem. I am running Fedora 7 on a laptop, and I was very happy that smartd was enabled by default. If it hadn't been, I wouldn't have known to replace my hard drive. I don't see why it's any less useful for desktop users to get notified about imminent hardware failure; they are even less likely to be making regular backups of important data. I would definitely recommend enabling smartd by default in Fedora 8. What would be the downside? Having smartd turned off makes sense assuming users are clever enough to know what they want and since all of them want fast system, nothing that's not required should not be started by default. It's the user who decides what to run on his machine, not the packager. And I think this is a good approach. The point of enabling smartd by default is to do the right thing for users who *aren't* clever enough to know that smartd exists in the first place, much less figure out how to turn it on and receive its messages. I'm sure everyone wants a fast system, but it seems a bit more important to know whether or not they are about to lose all of their data due to hard drive failure. |