Louwrentius

This post is about getting temperature monitoring to work with a Mac Mini running Linux.

Using Debian Lenny, out of the box, lm-sensors is not working. No sensors can be found. This is how temperature monitoring and fan speed monitoring can be made to work:

modprobe applesmc

If you run "sensors-detect" after this, and do a:

modprobe coretemp

Then "sensors" will give you ouput like this:

Mini:/sys/devices/platform# sensors

applesmc-isa-0300

Adapter: ISA adapter

Master : 2151 RPM (min = 1500 RPM)

temp1: +83.2°C

temp2: +68.0°C

Some software to control the fan speed:

http://stargate.solsys.org/mod.php?mod=faq&op=extlist&topicid=27&expand=yes#1 18

d=yes#118

If you build a NAS with many drives, it may be of interest to you which drives get hot and where they are located in the chassis. My Norco 4020 case has twenty drives in RAID 6, plus two operating system drives in RAID 1. I wrote a script that shows me the temperature of each drive, positioned in such a way that it represents the actual physical location of the drive in the chassis:

 -- 30 -- | -- 27 --
 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 25 |
 | 30 | 32 | 30 | 29 |
 | 31 | 33 | 33 | 29 |
 | 33 | 32 | 35 | 30 |
 | 32 | 34 | 35 | 31 |

In this example, you can determine that the top drives seem to stay the coolest. The center and lower drives get hotter.

If you want to use this script, you will have to change it for your own specific setup. You can get it here.

This visual representation would also be nice to identify which drive has failed and where it is located in the chassis.