Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of History

Timestamp:

Sep 13, 2009, 11:22:56 PM (15 years ago)

Author:

Gabriele Pohl

Comment:

Transfer content from homepage to here

History

@@ +1 @@
+== History of smartmontools ==
+
+Smartmontools was derived directly from smartsuite. 
+The smartsuite code was originally developed as a Senior Thesis by
+Michael Cornwell at the Concurrent Systems Laboratory (now part of the
+[http://ssrc.soe.ucsc.edu/ Storage Systems Research Center]), Jack Baskin School of Engineering, University of
+California, Santa Cruz.
+You can find some information about the original smartsuite project here:
+[http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/press_releases/archive/99-00/09-99/smart_software.htm Press Release 1], 
+[http://www.santa-cruz.com/archive/1999/September/22/local/stories/5local.htm Press Release 2], 
+[http://www.ucsc.edu/currents/99-00/09-27/smart.html Press Release 3].
+According to [http://www.ssrc.ucsc.edu/ SSRC] smartsuite is no longer maintained; the last release was in 2001.
+
+Smartmontools was first released in October 2002. It differs from smartsuite 
+in that it supports the ATA/ATAPI-5 standard. So for example {{{smartctl}}} from smartsuite 
+has no facility for printing the SMART self-test logs, and doesn't print timestamp
+information in the most usable way. The {{{smartctl}}} utility
+in smartmontools has added functionality for this ({{{-q}}}, {{{-l selftest}}},
+{{{-S}}}, {{{-T}}}, {{{-v}}} and {{{-m}}} options), updated documentation, and also fixes small
+technical bugs in smartsuite. (One example: smartsuite does not actually use the
+ATA SMART RETURN STATUS command to find out the health status of a disk.  It instead tries to infer this from the
+SMART Attribute values.) See the [http://sourceforge.net/browser/trunk/smartmontools/CHANGELOG CHANGELOG]
+file in our repository for a summary of what's been done.
+
+The {{{smartd}}} utility differs from the smartsuite {{{smartd}}} in major ways.
+First, it prints somewhat more informative error messages to the syslog.
+Second, on startup it looks for a configuration file
+{{{/etc/smartd.conf}}}, and if {{{smartd}}} finds this file, it
+monitors the list of devices therein, rather than querying all IDE and
+SCSI devices on your system. (If the configuration file does not
+exist, then it does query all IDE and SCSI devices.) Also, it's
+a well-behaved daemon and doesn't leave open file descriptors and other
+detrius behind. In addition, the {{{smartmontools}}} version of
+{{{smartd}}} can be instructed (via Directives in the configuration
+file) to monitor for changes in a number of different disk properties:
+the SMART status, failure or prefailure attributes going below
+threshold, new errors appearing in the ATA Error Log or the SMART
+Self-Test Log, and so on. {{{smartd}}} can also send an email warning or run a
+user-specified executable if it detects a problem with the disk.
+
+The other principle difference is that smartmontools is an
+OpenSource development project, meaning that we keep the files in SVN,
+and that other developers who wish to contribute can commit changes to
+the repository. If you would like to contribute, please write to to 
+[http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/smartmontools-support smartmontools-support].
+
+But the bottom line is that the code in smartmontools is derived
+directly from smartsuite and is similar. The smartsuite package
+can be found [http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartsuite/ here].