Essential SNMP, 2nd Edition

Veritas Disk Check

The Veritas Volume Manager is a package that allows you to manipulate disks and their partitions. It gives you the ability to add and remove mirrors, work with RAID arrays, and resize partitions, to name a few things. Although Veritas is a specialized and expensive package that is usually found at large data centers, don't assume that you can skip this section. The point isn't to show you how to monitor Veritas, but to show you how you can provide meaningful traps using a typical status program. You should be able to extract the ideas from the script we present here and use them within your own context.

Veritas Volume Manager (vxvm) comes with a utility called vxprint. This program displays records from the Volume Manager configuration and shows the status of each of your local disks. If there is an error, such as a bad disk or broken mirror, this command will report it. A healthy vxprint on the rootvol (/) looks like this:

    $ vxprint -h rootvol
    Disk group: rootdg

    TY NAME         ASSOC        KSTATE   LENGTH   PLOFFS   STATE    TUTIL0  PUTIL0
    v  rootvol      root         ENABLED  922320   -        ACTIVE   -       -
    pl rootvol-01   rootvol      ENABLED  922320   -        ACTIVE   -       -
    sd rootdisk-B0  rootvol-01   ENABLED  1        0        -        -       Block0
    sd rootdisk-02  rootvol-01   ENABLED  922319   1        -        -       -
    pl rootvol-02   rootvol      ENABLED  922320   -        ACTIVE   -       -
    sd disk01-01    rootvol-02   ENABLED  922320   0        -        -       -

The KSTATE (kernel state) and STATE columns give us a behind-the-scenes look at our disks, mirrors, etc. Without explaining the output in detail, a KSTATE of ENABLED ...