logwatch, smartd, and a varying parameter (Seek_Time_Performance)

[Ben Scott]

On 9/19/07, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
>     Prefailure: Seek_Time_Performance (8) changed to
>       252, 253, 252, 251, 252, 251, 252, 253,
>
>   It occurs to me that it would be really nice if logwatch could
> maintain a "tolerance" on this parameter, such that these normal
> variations are not reported, but any significant change would be.

  Well, there was nothing built-in to do this, so I ended up tweaking
the built-in script slightly.    logwatch does (I have discovered)
have a nice mechanism for letting you override stock scripts with your
own.  For example, the stock script which processes smartd entires is

	/usr/share/logwatch/scripts/services/smartd

So I copied that to

	/etc/logwatch/scripts/services/smartd

and then modified that copy.  This does mean if the stock script is
updated, I might have to manually merge those changes into my modified
copy to get them, but it's not too bad.

  In case anyone else finds the idea useful, attached is a diff of my
modification to ignore variations in Seek_Time_Performance within the
normal range.  (Watch out for line ending weirdness; this diff will
have gone from *nix to *doze to *nix and back again a few times once
it's out there).

  More generally, I found the logwatch scripts to be somewhat poor in
internal documentation, but also straight-forward enough that I could
figure things out well enough reasonably quickly.

-- Ben
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