Temperature panel

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#1 Wed, 08/15/2007 - 08:37
huberado

Temperature panel

First of all I am a big fan of Virtualmin. I have the server at remote location and was thinking if anybody thought about developing a module that would register a temperature from the sensors on motherboard and display a history of it in a graph, eventually it could send an alert to email or pager when temperature rises to dangerous level. What do you guys think about the idea? Or maybe there is already such a module for Virtualmin?

regards

Hubert

Wed, 08/15/2007 - 21:36
Joe
Joe's picture

Howdy Hubert,

Webmin's incomparable System and Server Status module (the best kept secret of savvy system administrators--this module rules) already has an lm-sensors test, which can work with any available sensor type.

That said, lm-sensors requires kernel support specific to your motherboard, and not all, or even a majority, or current motherboards are supported. Server class motherboards are better represented, but even those aren't guaranteed to work with lm-sensors. The only way to know is try out the sensors-detect command, follow the instructions and see if the sensors command works after loading up all of the right kernel modules.

The lm-sensors web page has lots of documentation (some of it is even good):

http://www.lm-sensors.org

This is unfortunately not an area that is well standardized, and motherboard manufacturers have a bad habit of releasing tarted up Windows applications that look like a car dashboard with speedometers and tachometers and other assorted useless crap and leave folks who are using those motherboards for real work out in the cold. ;-)

Good luck!

BTW-There are many tools for keeping up with this kind of data, like RRDTool based stuff. But, again, getting lm-sensors working is the hard part, and it may not be possible at all for your server, depending on what motherboard and chipset you have (and how much time you're willing to spend working on getting it working). In my experience about 50% of server class hardware (I mean server motherboards and chipsets from Intel, Tyan, etc.) works with only a little work, while only about 5-10% of desktop class hardware (pretty much everything, including servers at most hosting providers) works at all...even with a lot of effort.

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