Faced with such a challenge, I opted to punt for the time being and focus on other items. Priorities were able to allow for more thinking on the matter, and I decided that instead of banging my head against the table to figure out why things were not working when they should I would make this work using something other than MegaCli.

mfiutil was added to FreeBSD with the release of 8.0 and later on back ported to 7.3 as well. It doesn’t provide as great of detail about the RAID status or as much control as MegaCli does, but it works simply and hopefully should have more consistent performance and compatibility with the system. Using mfiutil (and my usual Perl) I have written a Nagios plugin to monitor the status of all physical drives and volumes recognized by the mfi driver.

The plugin takes output from commands like:
#mfiutil -u0 show volumes
mfi0 Volumes:
Id Size Level Stripe State Cache Name
mfid0 ( 136G) RAID-1 64K OPTIMAL Enabled
#mfiutil -u0 show drives
mfi0 Physical Drives:
( 137G) ONLINE <SEAGATE ST3146855SS S515 serial=3LN2BBYV> SAS enclosure 1, slot 0
( 137G) ONLINE <SEAGATE ST3146855SS S515 serial=3LN2BAVQ> SAS enclosure 1, slot 1
#mfiutil -u1 show volumes
mfi1 Volumes:
Id Size Level Stripe State Cache Name
mfid1 ( 9076G) RAID-5 64K OPTIMAL Disabled
#mfiutil -u1 show drives
mfi1 Physical Drives:
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2B1M3> SATA enclosure 1, slot 14
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2A3BC> SATA enclosure 1, slot 13
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2AC4F> SATA enclosure 1, slot 12
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2B37L> SATA enclosure 1, slot 11
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2ATGW> SATA enclosure 1, slot 10
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2B1ZT> SATA enclosure 1, slot 9
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2A943> SATA enclosure 1, slot 8
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD255TA> SATA enclosure 1, slot 7
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2B39K> SATA enclosure 1, slot 6
( 699G) HOT SPARE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2ATQB> SATA enclosure 1, slot 5
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2B1HZ> SATA enclosure 1, slot 4
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2A370> SATA enclosure 1, slot 3
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2AZT0> SATA enclosure 1, slot 2
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD2AT64> SATA enclosure 1, slot 1
( 699G) ONLINE <ST3750640NS 3BKH serial=5QD285NY> SATA enclosure 1, slot 0

and generates a Nagios status report like:

#check_mfi -u2 -s1
OK: mfid0:136G:RAID-1:OPTIMAL mfid1:9076G:RAID-5:OPTIMAL Drives:17 Hotspare(s):1

The -u flag is to specify how many mfi devices it should be looking for (and defaults to 1, i.e. mfi0, id unspecified) and -s is optional for how many hot spares to be looking for (0 if unspecified).

mfiutil needs to be run with root privs to work properly, but your Nagios process (or NRPE if you are checking on a remote system) is usually running as the nagios user, so the check_mfi plugin calls mfiutil via sudo. In order for this to work properly you should have a line like the following in your sudoers file:

nagios ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/mfiutil


You can download the check_mfi plugin directly from my site here. It has also been uploaded to Nagios Exchange (not yet properly listed) and Monitoring Exchange (I still can’t sort out why the world needs both of these, but I won’t be the one to choose which).

I pay best attention to questions and comments posted here on my blog and don’t typically look at what is on either of the other two sites except for when I upload a newer revision. That said, those sites may well have the most recent revision of my code.

There is an appropriately titled “check_raid_amrstat – Dell AMR PERC4 FreeBSD” plugin already on Nagios Exchange and Monitoring Exchange, but as usual I can’t seem to be content with some other people’s code.

I cleaned up the code a bit. It is a bit more in sticking with the plugin writing guidelines. Presents a bit more info than the original in a more compact format, with output similar to my MegaRAID SAS plugin. Nothing radical at all, but I like it better and present it here in case you want to see an alternative.

So today we had a meeting at work and it was my big chance to show off how well this plan was work. I hook the iPad up to our projector with the VGA adapter. Oddly, I don’t get any mirrored display.

Change around inputs on the projector looking for signals. Still nada.

Go into iPad settings to see if any new option has popped up recognizing the attached bit of hardware. Also nada.

Google around a bit and… oh damn. According to Apple (Article HT4108):

The iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter can play content to a VGA display when using the following apps:

• Videos
• Photos—Slideshow playback only
• YouTube
• Keynote
• Safari—Video content on webpages

So until I actually start playing a video, photos, etc. I get no output at all from the VGA. I can’t browse websites in Safari over VGA, so I can’t, for example, use the iPad to go through our help desk ticketing system during the weekly group meeting. Can’t demonstrate application configuration on the big screen, etc etc. I generally like Apple hardware, and I really want to like this and for it to work, but it has just turned into a big failure and disappointment.

I understand that Apple might want to, under some circumstances, restrict your video output so you aren’t arbitrarily dumping licensed content out over a digital connection. Instead with this they are limiting you so tightly over what they will allow you to output, for no real explainable reason. Wouldn’t it be easier to just have the VGA output be universal and then restrict certain flagged content (which they already do) if you try to push it out over the adapter?

I can only come up with two possible explanations for why this is done this way:

1. The iPad is running an OS that is still fundamentally thinking it is dealing with something more along the lines of an iPod Touch, and that all that there really is worth displaying on a big screen is videos and photos.
2. If you were able to hook up the iPad to an external display and use a Bluetooth keyboard on it, you would pretty much kill some large percentage (lets just say 20%) of the market for notebooks like the MacBook Air. So cripple the iPad to force consumers to move further up the foodchain to get full video out capability.

Hopefully this is just the first case and things will improve with the next OS release. I really do like my iPad, but this feature has pretty much killed a large part of its intended functionality.

I have no clue about which of these two sites is going to end up being the de facto source for Nagios plugins, but I have claimed what is mine on the Nagios branded one and will probably maintain things in parallel for the time being. Here are the links there for my LSI MegaRAID SAS (Dell PERC5 & PERC6) plugin, check_megaraid_sas, and my Perforce license plugin, check_p4_license.

I have a server running Perforce at work and it seems that every other year I have managed to not realize the license needed renewing until someone said to me, “Hey, is there any reason Perforce isn’t working?”

This year my spider-senses started tickling earlier on and I caught it in time, but I told myself I needed to count on more than just an odd sense of doom and foreboding in April. So I wrote a quickly Perl script that calls the Perforce p4 CLI tool and looks at your server’s license info and gripes back to you if it is going to be expiring any time soon.

I have also placed this plugin up on NagiosExchange, because I have found that it is better for me to do so earlier on than to have someone else find my stuff and upload then abandon it.