FreeNAS fan monitoring and/or failure LEDs

[Gnome]

How much interest would there be in a plug-in that would use an Arduino to monitor both fan speed and light up failure LEDs (or even warning LEDs for S.M.A.R.T failures or degraded arrays?). I have tested most of the basics (like determine if a zpool has failed, determine which port that failed device is on, determine fan speed, communicate with an Arduino from FreeNAS). So it can be done without too much work.

Might end up doing this for myself but if there is no interest I won't bother doing anything but basics.

I know we don't have a plug-in system yet, and I haven't really read about what kind of access there would be with the plug-in system anyway. They aren't a requirement tho, this can be accomplished quite easily without a plug-in system.

Please comment :)

 

[ProtoSD]

I'm just wondering what's the point of using/wasting an Arduino to do this, other than for the fun of it and lighting up some LEDS?

You can get all the info without an Arduino and send yourself a text or email.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the fun of it, but it seems like a lot of extra work.

 

[Gnome]

I'm just wondering what's the point of using/wasting an Arduino to do this, other than for the fun of it and lighting up some LEDS?

You can get all the info without an Arduino and send yourself a text or email.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the fun of it, but it seems like a lot of extra work.

Many hot-swap enclosures feature failure LEDs. They are usually standard on enterprise NAS units.

My home NAS has hot-swap IcyDock bays which also feature failure LEDs (they do nothing at this point), all they need is a device to control them. Naturally only the OS knows the true state of a device.

True it is a nice to have, with a hot swap bay it makes it incredibly easy to see which drive to remove.

I know officially FreeNAS does not yet support hot-swap but I've done my own testing and thus far I haven't had any trouble when hot swapping. My controllers are Intel ICH (Sandy Bridge motherboard) and IBM M1015 flashed as LSI (no BIOS). Both had no trouble with me randomly pulling a hard-drive or adding one while the system is running.

This isn't actually that much work, took me about 2 hours to investigate everything. The simple Arduino application won't take more than an hour and a basic bash script to do the monitoring and change the LEDs wouldn't take more than an hour or two (naturally the script would be run by CRON). Making it generic however will be a more significant task.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

I got nrpe working on FreeNAS, hopefully we can make a nice plugin for nrpe when 8.2 comes out. It's super easy to create scripts that can warn or alert at different conditions (Fan stuff, SMART stuff's already done), and we could bundle a bunch or even allow a custom script entry in the plugin. This is the reason I'm super excited to get the plugins system, to attempt making some sweet plugins =]

Anyways, it's not as cool as LEDs but it is a little more practical in my opinion cause it allows you to get email / text notifications. Only problem is youd need to run nagios/icinga somewhere.

 

[andrewg]

I am using a Chenbro ES34169 case that has four hot-swap bays, failure and activity LEDs for each bay, a general failure LED, two LAN activity LEDs, and a button labelled Mute. I'm also using a mix of Western Digital and Seagate drives. After installing them I discovered that they use opposite logic to indicate disk activity. The Seagates are normally on and blink off, the WD drives are normally off and blink on. That inconsistency irritates me so I'm going to run the activity indicators plus everything else through a PIC. The Mute button got me thinking that controlling a piezo wouldn't be a bad idea as a backup to the fail LEDs. While preparing for the PIC firmware I found that there is a standard for blinking LEDs! See IBPI in Wikipedia.