No more hiding in the server room

lm-sensors on CentOS 5.4

We run CentOS 5 on our servers. It ships with kernel 2.6.18.

When new servers come in for building, I rely on forum posts, snippets of information from the SuperMicro site and bits and pieces from lm-sensors.org to find the kernel modules and configuration files to use to get sensors working.

Recently I have been using the back ported kernel modules from ELRepo which is proving successful, but I would be interested to know if anyone else has these problems and what you do to address them.

Tags: centos, linux, sensors

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Permalink Reply by Craig on March 3, 2010 at 9:22pm

haven't had these issues as yet. then again we only use supported hardware (we use RHEL)

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Permalink Reply by Richard Holloway on March 3, 2010 at 9:46pm

Thanks for the reply.

I suppose my question is then, how do you know what is supported hardware?
Is there an approved hardware list I should be aware of?

Today I failed to get fan speeds for a SuperMicro X8STi.
lm-sensors.org suggested the Winbond 83627DHG chip was supported using w83627ehf.

I got the kernel module from ELRepo which shows voltages but not fan speeds and I built a custom 2.6.33 kernel which shows the same results.

Clearly it would be better if I could know this information before buying the hardware if at all possible.
Am I missing something?

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Permalink Reply by Baca Florin on March 4, 2010 at 4:07pm

I don't think there is an universal list of supported hardware. Still, if lm-sensors.org supported hardware says it works then it should. I haven't had problems with lm-sensors, installation/configuration went perfectly.
Maybe you should check the fan, from what I know only for 3 wire fan it displays the speed.
Temperatures are displayed properly ?

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Permalink Reply by Jim Williams on March 12, 2010 at 3:36am

My current employer only uses RHEL in production and we primarily use HP hardware platform. HP has a special set of packages they build to give us all that hardware level diagnostics and status info called the Proliant Service Pack. I am not too familiar with lm-sensors.org but it looks like a very similar set of tools. Have you used applications like lspci to probe the PCI bus and see what chipsets are discovered?

Red Hat does maintain a Hardware Compatibility List on their web site somewhere. Since CentOS is compiled directly from the Red Hat open source code then they should match up pretty darn close. Another place to look around would be ClearOS and ClearFoundation since they support a distribution built on top of CentOS you may find someone on their forums familiar with that particular hardware. Hope that helps out, I look forward to hearing what you find out.