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Jack M.
Asked: 2011-05-10 07:46:57 +0800 CST

Monitor Dell thermal sensors in FreeBSD?

  • 772

I'm trying to remotely monitor temperature sensors within two Dell PowerEdge 6850's. I have a fear that the building we are in is turning off the air conditioning on the weekends to save power, which doesn't bode well for a server room which normally sits around 75 degrees anyway.

Google has lead me to looking into freeipmi and the ipmi-sensors command, which I got installed from ports but doesn't help much. I get this output:

# ipmi-sensors
Segmentation fault: 11 (core dumped)

I'm at a loss on how to move forward. I no longer have physical access to the building on the weekends, so I need to do this monitoring remotely.

dell freebsd physical-environment

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Make sure you have loaded the ipmi kernel module first via

    kldload ipmi

    Then if you install the ipmitool port you should be able to run

    ipmitool sensor

    And it will give you the output of all the various sensors including dimm and other sensors on the motherboard. If your machine isn't supported by the ipmi kernel module then /dev/ipmi0 will not be created. At that point your only other option would be to monitor the cpu temperature itself.

    If you want to monitor the cpu temperature alone you can load the cpu temperature sensors via (for intel processors)

    kldload coretemp

    or for amd processors:

    kldload amdtemp

    At this point you can retrieve tempeture readings for each core of each processor in the server via 

    sysctl -a | grep temp

    They should appear looking something like this

    dev.cpu.0.temperature: 59.0C
dev.cpu.1.temperature: 59.0C
dev.cpu.2.temperature: 58.0C
dev.cpu.3.temperature: 58.0C
dev.cpu.4.temperature: 59.0C
dev.cpu.5.temperature: 59.0C
dev.cpu.6.temperature: 57.0C
dev.cpu.7.temperature: 57.0C
    • 3

  2. Forget the hi-tech way, just buy yourself a Maximum/Minimum Thermometer - they're $20, portable and useful elsewhere.

    Always be thinking ghetto ;)

    • 1

  3. Related, my zsh prompt:

    # Set prompts
setopt prompt_subst
PROMPT='%F{green}%n@%m%f        %F{yellow}%~%f
%# '    # default prompt
RPROMPT=' %B<[%*]/%F{red}$(sysctl -n hw.acpi.thermal.tz0.temperature)%f>%b'
                           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
    • 0

  4. Try ipmitool sdr elist all

    PS. ipmi.ko should be loaded, ipmitool installed
    PPS. Trust me, thermal monitoring is one of the lamest things ipmi can do - explore the power of Serial-over-LAN, System-Event-Log, PEF-traps, remote power control, boot device manipulation and KVM-over-LAN!

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