[Techtalk] Running servers too hot?

[Maria McKinley]

Kelly Jones wrote:
> How hot can 1U servers run, and where exactly do you take their temperature?
> 
> Can you measure the heat of their power supply exhaust or something?
> 
> I think we're running our servers too hot, but no one else believes
> me, so I need some sort of evidence/proof.
> 
> They hang frequently, but my cow-orkers blame demons and ghosts.
> 


Hi Kelly,

If you just want to check the temperature, you can install lm-sensors, 
and then run sensors-detect. sensors-detect will give you a couple of 
sensor names (and say something about how it isn't going to put this in 
a config file, but here are the drivers or something like that), then 
you can run modprobe on those sensors. For example, I get this as output:

#----cut here----
# Chip drivers
it87
k8temp
#----cut here----

I ignore the whole thing about the config file, and let modprobe do that 
by running modprobe for each sensor:
modprobe it87
modprobe k8temp

Once the modules are set, you can run

sensors

and it will output various voltages and temperatures.

I run munin on my servers so I can keep track of temperature over the 
long haul. Here is an example:

http://www.shadlen.org/munin/Servers/billie.shadlen.org-sensors_temp.html

When we first started using munin to keep track of temperatures, we were 
having a temperature problem, which you can see in the year graph during 
May when we first started tracking..

If you are interested, I can give you more information about installing 
munin.

cheers,
maria