On Feb 2, 2009, at 9:07 PM, Dave Smith wrote:
Kimball Larsen wrote:
Possibly not - but if the temp ever gets to 150 in the first place,
the new A/C unit I installed is no longer working properly, and
I'll be alerted to the fact I gotta get some cold air in that
server room asap.
That's the only reason I needed this. :)
I am working on a project at work that does exactly this.
Unfortunately, it's not exactly available to the public. :) We allow
users to customize alarms and thresholds and can take preventative
action like shutting down equipment that is over-heating or alerting
the staff in an operations center. We've actually built quite a
framework of it, all using Qt with a pretty nifty ORM backed by
MySQL on Fedora 10, but I digress.
We manage multi-rack systems of hundreds of pieces of equipment
(including servers and signal processing gear). In our case, we
usually use a separate box for monitoring temperature as they are
more reliable and don't fail if a server fails (like from
overheating!). If you're interested, I can give you more info, but
the boxes we use tend to make their temperature data available via
HTTP or SNMP, both of which are readily fetchable with command line
scripts.
Separate temperature boxes are also nice because they usually have
probes that you can place where you want them, like right near the A/
C unit so you can tell quickly if it has failed and fix the problem
before it damages your gear. They are pretty cheap too. I can't
imagine operating any kind of data center, small or large, without
one.
--Dave
I would agree - but I'm not really running a datacenter. I've got a
single rack. In said rack I've got a single 1U server. Below that on
a shelf I've got a single tower form factor computer acting as a
fileserver. Next to that I've got a UPS. Above the 1U mounted server
I've got a monitor, mouse, keyboard, and kvm.
I just needed a very cheap and dirty way to know if the temp spiked on
the server.
If, however, I ever add much hardware into this room, you can betcher
behind I'll be looking for stand-alone devices to monitor temp/
humidity, etc.
Thanks!
-- Kimball
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