On 2/26/2010 10:46 AM, Paul Heinlein wrote:
Does anyone know of a cheap temperature sensor that will work with Linux? I don't need a fancy monitoring appliance, I just want a simple sensor that I can connect to one of my monitoring servers to let me know if the server room is getting hot
There is a good chance that lm-sensors supports your servers with no additional hardware needed. To configure lm-sensors, run 'sensors-detect' as root. If your cpu/motherboard is supported you will be able to read system temps directly either using SNMP or by scraping 'sensors' output.
I'm looking for room temperature, not case temperature.
Some hardware provides SNMP-addressable information on the temperature of inbound air, not just case temperature. I realize that inbound temperature is not exactly the same as room temp, but it's a pretty good approximation in many case.
Yes, are you really that concerned about whether people in the room are comfortable - they'll tell someone if they aren't even without gadgets. If the room is getting hot, so will the equipment, so internal sensors will show the trend, just offset by a bit of equipment heat. Most Cisco equipment and higher end UPS's will have SNMP readable sensors that monitoring programs can read, graph, and alarm on thresholds, and I believe you can enable them on linux servers with the right snmpd.conf settings.