About four years ago I wrote an entry about how your SMART drive database of attribute meanings needs regular updates . That entry was written on the occasion of updating the database we use locally on our Ubuntu servers, and at the time we were using a mix of Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 servers, both of which had older drive databases that probably dated from early 2018 and early 2020 respectively. It is now late 2025 and we use a mix of Ubuntu 24.04 and 22.04 servers, both of which have drive databases that are from after October of 2021.

Experienced system administrators know where this one is going: today I updated our SMART drive database again, to a version of the SMART database that was more recent than the one shipped with 24.04 instead of older than it.

It's a fact of life that people forget things. People especially forget things that are a long way away, even if they make little notes in their worklog message when recording something that they did (as I did four years ago). It's definitely useful to plan ahead in your documentation and write these notes, but without an external thing to push you or something to explicitly remind you, there's no guarantee that you'll remember.

All of which leads me to the view that it would be useful for us to have a long range calendar reminder system, something that could be used to set reminders for more than a year into the future and ideally allow us to write significant email messages to our future selves to cover all of the details (although there are hacks around that, such as putting the details on a web page and having the calendar mail us a link). Right now the best calendar reminder system we have is the venerable calendar , which we can arrange to email one-line notes to our general address that reaches all sysadmins, but calendar doesn't let you include the year in the reminder date.

(For SMART drive database updates, we could get away with mailing ourselves once a year in, say, mid-June. It doesn't hurt to update the drive database more than every Ubuntu LTS release. But there are situations where a reminder several years in the future is what we want.)

PS: Of course it's not particularly difficult to build an ad-hoc script system to do this, with various levels of features. But every local ad-hoc script that we write is another little bit of overhead, and I'd like to avoid that kind of thing if at all possible in favour of a standard solution (that isn't a shared cloud provider calendar).