[olug] drive and filesystem health monitoring

[Matt Anderson]

I'm looking to implement some automated monitoring (probably nagios)  
of drive and filesystem health.  Mostly, I'm interested on solutions  
that will work on OS X, but I'm curious about how this differs from  
Linux/FreeBSD as well.

I've played around a little with smartmontools recently.  Seems to  
work great to query information on SATA drives (and I assume works  
equally well on IDE drives), but no love on firewire drives.  Is  
there any way to find out information about a drive 'hidden' behind a  
firewire bus?  Is there any way of querying the firewire bus about  
devices that live on it?  What kind of information is available?   
What tool(s) do you use?

Anyone do any monitoring of filesystem health?  Is there a better way  
to do this than running fsck or (OS X specific) 'diskutil  
verifyVolume' and looking for suspicious things in the output?

Anyone have any pro-nagios or pro-something-else opinions as to the  
best monitoring package to start with?

TIA,

--
  Matt Anderson