smartd's email notifcations

Hi,

configuring email notifications of smartd is a pretty unpleasant
experience, I have to say. I'm still not sure that I've got it right,
and I'm not even sure whether smartd supports what I want.

In smartd, I currently have
-m root -M daily -H -t -l error -l selftest -R 5! -R 187! -W 2,45,50

And smartd is started with -s /var/lib/smartd to make the states
persistent across reboots and restarts of smartd.
(BTW: State persistence makes so much sense to me that it should be
enabled by default, IMHO.)

Do I have to specify -U 198 to get emails about offline sectors? The
documentation claims that -U 198 is the default. So I hope I'll get emails.

In addition, I want to get an email whenever the reallocated sector
counter increases (that's why I have -R 5!). But until recently, I
didn't have -M daily in smartd.conf and -M once was the default,
apparently. So I got exactly one email from smartd saying the counter
increased. I never got a second or even a third email, even though the
counter continued to increase.

So I added -M daily, but the documentation says that -M daily means that
I get daily reminder emails. My interpretation is that once the
reallocation sector count has increased, I get one mail per day forever
- even if it does not increase further. That would be less than ideal,
to be honest.

Sure, reminder emails make sense for certain things (like failing
attributed, non-zero offline sector count). But they don't make sense
for other things (like reallocated sector count).

Is there any way to tell smartd to send an email whenever the
reallocated sector count changes - and only if it has changed since the
last email?


Regards,
  Sven


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