beep the buzzer on disk error

mactsk

Dabbler
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Sep 12, 2012
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24
Sometimes you could have a freenas that is unable to send email, for instance when it is on a lan that is disconnected, and you don't have an internal email service, or for other reasons.
so it could be useful, also as another layer of alarm to be able to beep the buzzer in a pattern to signal a broken disk
Example, 3 fast beeps, for the error, and one beep for disk0, two beeps for disk 1 and so on...

Fabrizio
 

cyberjock

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Mar 25, 2012
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19,526
I don't know what value that would add honestly. If you've setup the email system then you should be good to go. If the LAN is disconnected it should become blatantly obvious that your server isn't working right when you can't connect to the shares.

The expectation that you can and have properly setup your email is not unrealistic. It is also not that unrealistic to expect that the email service you are using is available to the server(either via local email server or via the internet). Most servers I've ever dealt with used email service to send important messages regarding the status of the server if something is wrong. Additionally FreeNAS sends nightly emails that you should be glancing over daily. Also many(most?) servers are not within earshot and you may not hear the beep anyway. I also set my server up to send nightly emails of SMART data on all of my drives and I look at it very closely daily. There is a thread with my code if you wish to go that route.

But if you want this feature, feel free to come up with the code and submit it via a ticket to support.freenas.org.
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
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May 29, 2011
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18,681
If the LAN is disconnected it should become blatantly obvious that your server isn't working right when you can't connect to the shares.

The expectation that you can and have properly setup your email is not unrealistic.

You've set forth a bunch of statements here based on the way you imagine a server will be used, which you've based on a common use case, but which is hardly the only use case. Alarms are extremely common on storage gear as one of the notification strategies, and they're very handy for gear where the gear isn't permanently situated in one network environment - places where your expectation that "properly setup [...] email" is in fact unrealistic. Or in a computer shop environment, one might reasonably have a storage device for backups of customer data that isn't attached to the network; some customers may actually mandate storage that doesn't have a path to the Internet for maintaining PCI compliance or other industry-required fun stuff. A shop is also likely to have a bunch of smaller drives and older gear laying around, which for some of us turns into a "let's not buy new something we can build for free" sort of thing.

That having been said, the FreeNAS developers haven't included the audio infrastructure in the kernel, which limits what can easily be done by an average user to hack in an audible alarm.
 

cyberjock

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Mar 25, 2012
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It's not how I imagine a server. It's now iXsystems(FreeNAS' owner) envisions it.

I know the audible infrastructure has been removed, otherwise I wouldn't have a ticket requesting that audio be added to FreeNAS. I think it'll happen with 9.x.

If you choose not to use emails, that's a big loss for you. You won't get nightly security emails, SMART emails, UPS emails, etc. FreeNAS is designed with the expectation of getting in contact with the admin via emails. If that's not going to work for you, then FreeNAS may not be the best product for you. I've worked in public utilities where there were internal LANs that had no connection to the internet for security reasons, and they always maintained an email server because so many COTS products use emails.

But like I said before, if you want it added feel free to submit a ticket at support.freenas.org. If you provide the code you can expect that it will be rolled into the next release. If not, expect the feature to be added if and when the development team decides its worth the effort and time.
 

SMnasMAN

Contributor
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Dec 2, 2018
Messages
177
Is there anyway to get an audio alert or buzzer via freenas at this point? this would really be nice (like HW raid cards, or the enterprise san at work).

if this still isnt an option, i'll prob try to sacrifice a mikrotik to use its beeper and some snmp or ssh command sent out by FN to the mikrotik (w a script on it for the buzzer)

(all of which, my scripted mikrotik solution , or email alerts, including the dependence on lan+internet+email server are all more fail prone than a physical buzzer - especially for the most critical alert one could get from a file server) the email alerts should complement a buzzer option (that can be disabled if user wants).

tks
 

SMnasMAN

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Dec 2, 2018
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