Freebsd – Monitor Dell thermal sensors in FreeBSD

dellfreebsdphysical-environment

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.

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
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