[tech] Temperature Monitoring in Server Room [repost]

[David Adam]

On Mon, 18 Mar 2019, Melissa Star wrote:
> I just realised - if you have smartmontools installed on linux machines, 
> each hard drive or SSD will provide its “Airflow Temperature”, which I 
> can extract via script.
> 
> I'm thinking of centralising this for all the servers I run, and 
> collecting the data to chart, having a display at home that gives me 
> live info for all machines under my control.

We used to do this on all the servers, but I think evil is the only one 
still running:
   https://ucc.asn.au/stats/
It reads the fan and temperature data from lm-sensors (run `sensors` on a 
bare metal machine to get an idea of what's available), plus various 
system statistics, and writes them into some custom RRDs. It is 
approximately zero fun to maintain.

Collectd (https://github.com/collectd/collectd) has both SMART and 
lm-sensors plugins, and was the most sensible tool for our use last time I 
checked, so if we were going to set anything up I'd start with that. It 
hasn't been updated for a couple of years but is fairly mature. You don't 
need root access to start playing around with it.

The fanciest option would be to write a Cockpit plugin 
(https://cockpit-project.org/ currently available at 
https://secure.ucc.asn.au/missioncontrol/), but we don't have the 
timeseries store stuff set up in that and it sounds like a lot more work.

David Adam
zanchey