mpt-statusd reports RAID changes even when there is no RAID

[Oliver Mueller]

when using the mpt-statusd on a server, which has the RAID hardware installed but currently no disks attached, it will continuously send out emails stating that:

"This is a RAID status update from mpt-statusd. The mpt-status
program reports that one of the RAIDs changed state:

Report from /etc/init.d/mpt-statusd on ..."

This message comes up every 5 minutes, even though the status of the RAID can't have changed.

Line 51 in the /etc/init/mpt.statusd file is the problem here:

 48 # Check ever $PERIOD seconds, send email on every status
 49 # change and repeat ever $REMIND seconds if the raid is still
 50 # bad.
 51 if (mpt-status -i $ID) |grep -q 'state OPTIMAL' ; then
 52 BADRAID=false
 53 else
 54 BADRAID=true
 55 logger -t mpt-statusd "detected non-optimal RAID status"
 56 fi

The "grep" in line 51 return 1, even if there is no output of mpt-status at all. This is normal behaviour of grep though. But i think the script should also check, if there is ANY output at all. Because it it doesn't, it will continue to send out emails.

I know, i could uninstall it or do some other things to avoid this situation, but there are some reasons why it make sense to have it running on those machines.

- if someone temporarily removes the drives or put some drive in the server at a later point of time, it is easy to forget about the statusd
- in times of ansible, puppet, and other, more scripts are just checking for hardware and installing packages like statusd automatically
- the email is just wrong. there is no changed state. it is a bug
- other people might have more reasons

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I would expect that the statusd is not reporting on any changes or alike, if there is no RAID configured or disks attached.

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# lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
Release: 16.04

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# apt-cache policy mpt-status
mpt-status:
  Installed: 1.2.0-8
  Candidate: 1.2.0-8
  Version table:
 *** 1.2.0-8 500
        500 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1.2.0-4.2.hwraid1 500
        500 http://hwraid.le-vert.net/ubuntu wily/main amd64 Packages