So who the heck is this Administrator person?

Software & Operating Systems Linux
1

I decided to install a handy utility called gsmartcontrol on my Fedora 27 laptop. After successfully installing it, I get this prompt when trying to run it from the GNOME application menu:

Authentication Required
Authentication is required to run GSmartControl
Administrator
Password:

Root password does not work, nor does that of the current user (who is in the sudoer file.) Who the heck is Administrator? This ain’t Windows NT…

2

What happens if you access the program from cli when logged into a root shell?

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3

Yeah or run it with gksu.

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4

Thanks for the suggestions. Here are the results; unfortunately neither of them worked.

# gsmartcontrol
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused

(gsmartcontrol:16690): Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display: 

$ gksu gsmartcontrol
ksh: gksu: not found [No such file or directory]

Searching the repo for gksu suggested an alternative called beesu, so I installed that. However, I get exactly the same error that @Dynamic_Gravity 's suggestion generated.

5

That means the package is either fucked, or really buggy still.

If it doesn’t run as root its definitely messed up.

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6

I think it may be an X Windows permission problem. I tried:

$ xhost +localhost

…but got the same error. I also found some references to PolicyKit on the web, so the package may not have configured security properly.

I think there’s a command line utility, so I may have to use that to get SMART readings from my drives.

7

There all ancient programs for running GUI programs, they won’t work in wayland.

It usually wants your password when it wants elevated privileges. Assuming your in the wheel group (Administrator / sudo group)

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8

So that gave me another idea. I logged out and for my X session selected “GNOME Classic” instead of “GNOME”. And gsmartcontrol fired right up, after feeding it my password.

Now I need to figure out how severe an IDNF SMART error is…

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9

Any SMART errors at all, I immediately replace the drive. Served me well so far as every single drive has subsequently failed in a matter of months at most.

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10

Ive had the opposite experince. every drive ive had with smart errors has continued to work for many years. Only dead drive ive had is when the controller died and could not longer be written to and would randomlly drop out.

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11

I do this as well. If it’s still under warranty, then definitely RMA it and get a shiny new one.

“SMART error” has always been enough explanation to get a replacement, no questions asked, even if it’s still functional.

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12

This is actually a good question. I’ve heard some people say that anything other than reallocated/pending sectors can be ignored. Some people even say that if reallocated sectors is only a couple of sectors, you can ignore it.

Other people like @Ruffalo think that any error calls for replacement. Personally, when I’ve been, um, economically challenged, I’ve used a drive with a single reallocated sector for more than a year.

13

I can confirm this does qualify for warranty replacement from certain OEM’s. As far as I know it qualifies with Dell, HP, and Lenovo.

Can’t say for any others.

14

How do you know they failed if you replaced them?

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15

SMART, to my knowledge, is a predictive failure mechanism. Meaning that a failure is coming and the drive should be replaced.

I know that where I work, standard practice is to replace the drive if we get that but we’re doing work for a bulk customer who bought a massive extended warranty.

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16

I bought a WD Red 8 TB NAS HDD and it had a SMART error first run. Didn’t fsck around, took it back the same day.

17

Reallocation is part of how mechanical drives work. Theres usually a threshold to this though. If you’re throwing out drives with a couple reallocated sectors, you’re wasting money really. Other metrics do matter though, I had an HGST drive fail smart on spin retry. Luckily within warranty.

18

Yes, that’s a logic trap. I learned my lesson when I tried ignoring the errors and a couple drives died.

Nobody throws out drives with “a couple reallocated sectors”. You don’t look at the raw SMART data, you get an alert saying the number of reallocated sectors (or whatever) passed a set threshold, which indicates the drive is likely to fail.

19

Well, that’s the thing. I’m not getting an alert that the drive is failing. However, when I look in the drive’s onboard error log I see several “ID Not Found” (IDNF) errors. Some googling indicates that this is a corrupt sector. However its been about 400 hours of uptime since the last error occurred.

20

Ahh, OK. If SMART isn’t alerting I basically wouldn’t worry about it. Obviously you should have backups regardless.

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