# Temperature monitoring possible?



## carmik (Jul 9, 2012)

Hello all,

I am having a couple of boxes running in a room together with a pbx. Today the pbx stopped operating and upon opening this room, it was full of heat. The cause was the empty batteries of the A/C remote control...

Since I'd definitely like to avoid this in the future, I was thinking about utilizing a small utility/daemon/something that monitors temperatures, as reported by the motherboard temperature sensor(s) and sends an email when a threshold is exceeded.

Any suggestions? Like I said, I don't need/want a full-fledged complex monitoring solution. Just something that fits the job description above...


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## SirDice (Jul 9, 2012)

It depends a bit on the hardware you have. Some simply work with coretemp(4) or amdtemp(4), others require smbus(4) and sysutils/mbmon.


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## carmik (Jul 9, 2012)

Thanks for the fast response, much appreciated!

This is a Pentium 4 system so most likely coretemp(4) won't work. sysutils/mbmon does not seem to support off-the-box mail alarms of some sort, so for the time it seems I'm out of luck...


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## wblock@ (Jul 9, 2012)

Monitoring the motherboard temperature would help, but it would be better to monitor room temperature.  There are expensive devices to do that, meant to be used with Nagios (which is great, by the way) and other monitoring systems.  There are also USB-connected temperature sensors which are much less expensive (untested by me).  There are projects to build some of these.  For example, a quick search turned up http://code.google.com/p/mikrowerk/wiki/USBTemp.

PS: why would the AC need batteries in the remote control to operate?


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## tingo (Jul 9, 2012)

Be warned: some Pentium 4 systems doesn't have temperature monitoring at all.


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## carmik (Jul 10, 2012)

wblock@ said:
			
		

> Monitoring the motherboard temperature would help, but it would be better to monitor room temperature.


Definitely. However this is a closed room, I could establish upper limits on the monitored temperatures and do my job like that. The 2 systems I have there have their side cases removed, so the m/board temperature sensor follows the room temperature with a known error.



> PS: why would the AC need batteries in the remote control to operate?


Beats me... One theory: AC was set to auto and since some systems take room temperature from the remote and not from the indoor unit sensor, loss of the temp signal might have had the AC turn off as a precaution...


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## mc1 (Jul 11, 2012)

Maybe try kldload coretemp and then sysctl -a | grep -i "temp".  If that works I would add coretemp_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf.  Hope this helps!


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