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The developers and supporters of smartmontools
Table of Contents
- Bruce Allen (Initiator and Project Leader)
- Christian Franke (Developer and Maintainer)
- Guido Guenther (Developer and Maintainer)
- Gabriele Pohl (Website Maintainer)
- Erwan Velu (Packager and Maintainer)
- Other portraits
Bruce Allen (Initiator and Project Leader)
I am a professor of physics at the U. of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, and a Director of the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover, which is operated by the Max Planck Gesellschaft and Leibniz University Hannover.
I got interested in SMART because of my research work. I work on data analysis for gravitational waves (the LIGO, GEO and VIRGO detectors) and my research groups build and operate large computer clusters for this purpose. My research group at the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover operates a cluster with 2400 disks (the Atlas Cluster) and 1100 TB of storage. My research group at U. Wisconsin - Milwaukee runs a beowulf cluster with 1200 (SATA-II) distributed disks attached to hardware RAID controllers. We have more than 300 TB disk space on that system. It's nice to have advanced warning when a disk is going to fail.
Smartmontools is the only open-source software project that I manage. When smartmontools first started in 2002, I did most of the coding and real work. I was lucky to quickly find several other developers like Doug Gilbert and Christian Franke who knew much more than I did! These days I mostly do coordination and cheerleading - in any given technical area there are typically other developers who know more than I do.
I also do some work on BOINC, and run the Einstein@Home distributed search for gravitational waves.
Christian Franke (Developer and Maintainer)
My interest in hard disk monitoring actually starts when the disk of the christmas-gift-PC for my son failed in the evening of Dec. 23, 2003. This resulted in a first Windows port of smartctl checked in on Feb. 23, 2004. Future plan for smartmontools is a major redesign of smartd and the internal device interface, which benefits from the transition from C to C++.
My other open source contributions include some small patches for Cygwin and Mozilla.org (Firefox/Thunderbird/SeaMonkey and Bugzilla) codebase, a Windows port of hdparm, and a recent Cygwin port of GRUB2.
In real life, I hold a degree in computer science and work for a company developing applications for banking & finance.
Guido Guenther (Developer and Maintainer)
Guido has a sharp eye for distribution issues and clean system architecture.
He improves Makefiles, configuration and installation scripts, cares for packaging
issues and makes sure that Return Values are correct.
Last not least, he added CCISS (Compaq Smart Array Controller) support with
contributions from Praveen Chidambaram, Douglas Gilbert and Frederic Boiteux.
Gabriele Pohl (Website Maintainer)
Once upon a time I got an alarming BIOS message whilst booting my computer:
SMART Failure Predicted on Primary Master: Warning! Immediately back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A Failure may be imminent..
I was very curious, what it could be, that claimed to know, what's up with my harddisk. I started an investigation about the predicted disk error and SMART in general, which leads me straightly to smartmontools. I use it for 4 years now and wrote two articles (German), to spread good news about it. To help both, the project and the users, I reorganized the smartmontools website a bit. I hope you'll like it.
We have a main menu with seven sections, an integrated search engine and a new layout.
Next step will be, to update the websites content, so that it reflects the state of the
current version 5.3.8. Conributions are welcome!
Mail to smartmontools-support
list, if you have questions or want to add information.
Erwan Velu (Packager and Maintainer)
My interest in SMART arose at my previous job at Mandriva. I was building up a Linux distribution to turn a set of computers into a super computer (HPC). While looking at how we can manage such a cluster, I was faced with some failing disks. Doing a short research on that problem, I found this project.
As I am also packaging applications in RPM for Mandriva Linux, I decided to include smartmontools in it. My role is to keep smartmontools up-to-date in the Linux distribution and reporting bugs to the developers. To be honest, this happens once in a blue moon.
Since I am implicated in the smartmontools project, friends often ask me for help in understanding how theirs disks feels ;o). So I also wrote an article about smartmontools in French language.
Other portraits
will follow..
