Experimental Areca Support

Dear Smartmontools Users,

I'd like to announce that smartmontools now has some experimental code to 
support smartctl on Areca SATA RAID controllers (Linux only). Thanks to 
Hank Wu (Areca) and Oliver Bock (AEI Hannover) for their contributions. I 
have tested this on ARC 1261 controllers, and am starting to use this on 
production systems in the next days.

The code must be built from the current smartmontools CVS archive.

Note: smartd does not yet support Areca, but this should be coming soon.

PLEASE BE CAUTIOUS: USE THIS CODE ON CRITICAL OR PRODUCTION SYSTEMS ONLY 
AFTER YOU HAVE DONE 'DUE DILIGENCE' TESTING YOURSELF.

Please report success or failure to the Smartmontools Mailing List 
<[email protected]>.

Note that the interface to the device is not through the read/write disk 
device like /dev/sda, but instead via the SCSI generic device interface. A 
typical invokation is:

    ./smartctl -a -d areca,1 /dev/sg2

If one of the Areca command-line tools (for example cli64) is running and 
accessing the device, then smartctl will exit with a polite error message 
saying that the controller is currently being accesssed by another 
program.

The Areca controller must have firmware version 1.46 or later. Earlier 
versions will not return SMART information but will instead produce 
(harmless) SCSI error messages.

Cheers,
      Bruce

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