23. Alert

FreeNAS® provides an alert system to provide a visual warning of any conditions that require administrative attention. The Alert button in the far right corner flashes red when there is an outstanding alert. In the example alert shown in Figure 23.1, the system is warning that the S.M.A.R.T. service is not running.

_images/alert2a.png

Fig. 23.1 Example Alert Message

Informational messages have a green OK, warning messages flash yellow, and messages requiring attention are listed as a red CRITICAL. CRITICAL messages are also emailed to the root user account. If you are aware of a critical condition but wish to remove the flashing alert until you deal with it, uncheck the box next to that message.

Behind the scenes, an alert daemon checks for various alert conditions, such as volume and disk status, and writes the current conditions to /var/tmp/alert. The daemon retrieves the current alert status every minute and will change the solid green alert icon to flashing red if a new alert is detected.

Current alerts can also be viewed from the Shell option of the Console Setup Menu (Figure 3.1) or from the Web Shell (Figure 17.1) by running alertcli.py.

Some of the conditions that trigger an alert include:

  • used space on a volume goes over 80%
  • new OpenZFS feature flags are available for the pool; this alert can be unchecked if you choose not to upgrade the pool at this time
  • a new update is available
  • non-optimal multipath states detected
  • ZFS pool status changes from HEALTHY
  • a S.M.A.R.T. error occurs
  • the system dataset does not reside on the boot pool
  • the system is unable to bind to the WebGUI IPv4 Address set in System → General
  • the system can not find an IP address configured on an iSCSI portal
  • a periodic snapshot or replication task fails
  • a VMware login or a VMware-Snapshot task fails
  • deleting a VMware snapshot fails
  • a Certificate Authority or certificate is invalid or malformed
  • an update failed, or the system needs to reboot to complete a successful update
  • a re-key operation fails on an encrypted pool
  • if LDAP failed to bind to the domain
  • the status of an Avago MegaRAID SAS controller has changed; mfiutil(8) is included for managing these devices

An alert is also generated when the Avago HBA firmware version does not match the driver version. To resolve this alert, download the IT (integrated target) firmware, not the IR (integrated RAID) firmware, from the Avago website. Specify the name of the firmware image and BIOS as well as the controller to flash:

sas2flash -o -f firmwareimagename -b biosname -c controllernumber

When finished, reboot the system. The new firmware version will appear in the system messages and the alert will be cleared.