[Discuss] Thermal monitoring

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On 10/21/2011 11:16 AM, Rich Braun wrote:
> Jerry Feldman asked:
>> But, I don't have any ACPI support: /proc/acip/thermal_zone is empty.
>> I'm looking for a quick and dirty way to check to see if the unit temps are
>> ok since this system is our Oracle server.
> My experience on this topic has been woeful. Support for sensors is not
> standardized and remains very much dependent on which CPU and which
> motherboard you have.  Most distros support a package "sensors" (sometimes
> named "lm-sensors") to provide the command-line tool, but once you have that
> then you need something else (in my case, a cobbled-together home-brew script)
> to feed it into anything from Nagios to Cacti to munin to a simple
> email-when-it-gets-hot script.
>
> Example on one of my own servers (a Core I5-760).  Absolutely no luck getting
> lm-sensors working:
>
>  # ls /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/
>  # sensors
>  No sensors found!
>  Make sure you loaded all the kernel drivers you need.
>  Try sensors-detect to find out which these are.
>  # sensors-detect
>  # sensors-detect revision 5818 (2010-01-18 17:22:07 +0100)
>   ...
>  Now follows a summary of the probes I have just done.
>  Just press ENTER to continue:
>
>  Driver `it87':
>   * ISA bus, address 0x290
>     Chip `ITE IT8720F Super IO Sensors' (confidence: 9)
>
>  Do you want to overwrite /etc/sysconfig/lm_sensors? (YES/no):
>  # modprobe i2c-dev
>  # sensors
>  No sensors found!
>  ---
>
> But on a newer Core I5-2500K, it all works fine:
>
>  # sensors
>  coretemp-isa-0000
>  Adapter: ISA adapter
>  Core 0:      +37.0?C  (high = +80.0?C, crit = +98.0?C)
>   ...
>  Core 3:      +35.0?C  (high = +80.0?C, crit = +98.0?C)
>
> So, alas, I find myself just tossing out motherboards that don't cooperate (if
> the machine is mission-critical).  Not sure how to determine prior to buying
> one whether it will.
This is an old Supermicro board with 2 older Xeon dual core chips.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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