VxVM Failures

Getting Notified When Failures Occur

When Veritas volume manager is installed with the default options, the vxrelocd(1m) failure event detection and subdisk relocation daemon is started at boot time. This daemon is responsible for detecting device failures, relocating subdisks on failed devices to alternate devices, and notifying personnel that a device or Veritas object failed. The notifications are sent to the root user by default and look similar to the following:

To: root@system
Subject: Volume Manager failures on host winnie
Content-Length: 240

Failures have been detected by the VERITAS Volume Manager:

failed disks:
c1t4d0

failed plexes:
raid5vol-P08

Since email addressed to the root user is directed to the local mail spool by default, it is advantageous to forward all messages addressed to root to an actual email address. This can be accomplished by enabling email forwarding and adding the following alias to /etc/aliases:
root: admin@mycompany.com

If you would prefer to use a separate account for notifications, you can append the account name to the line that starts vxrelocd(1m) in the vxvm-recover init script:

$ grep vxrelocd /etc/init.d/S95vxvm-recover

vxrelocd root storageproblems &

Configuring the notification facility to route messages to a valid account is crucial and ensures timely notifications when failures are detected.