CPU Temperature Monitoring

[wtfuar]

That's totally off to reply to just lower the time span. All the videos on How easy Freenas is to be setup and running delude the audience that in fact freenas is for geeks and people with loads of time to dig into manpages. Sorry but ... LOL my bad.

 

[cyberjock]

FreeNAS is for geeks. Most non-geeks won't want to build a dedicated file server. FreeNAS does make building a FreeBSD based system far easier than it would be from FreeBSD's command line. While the OS is still having features added and whatnot, there's very little you can't do if you learn how to write some scripts. Depending on how fast(or slow) you are to learn, you could have a working script in just a few minutes... or never. I will tell you there is an example script on this forum for recording CPU temp and date/time every minute to a log file on your zpool. I know because I posted it.

 

[jgreco]

I cant stress enough to have those features to display VITAL information on a professional NAS. I need actual an historical data on CPU Temp, HDD Temp, System Temp, SMART, FAN Speeds at least!
Is there any way to pull this by SNMP and monitor it with nagios or other tools? I strongly rethink my Freenas build I have and rebuild on a windows plattform. I would lose ZFS, but what is a robust and scalable FS worth if the hardware is at a higher risk to fail.

Why aren't you monitoring for this information through the IPMI-BMC path? Professionals do not rely on having agents installed in every OS.

 

[wtfuar]

Why aren't you monitoring for this information through the IPMI-BMC path? Professionals do not rely on having agents installed in every OS.

Well do you have some resources on that? I'd like to put the IPMB port on my AXX6DRV3GEXP to any use, but as I do not use a serverboard but a mini-ITX I was not able to find any alternative method to use it. Is there a project to use it with an external screen or via Raspberry Pi? ... for example

 

[jgreco]

So you are using consumer grade products and wondering why you don't have access to server grade resources?

If you are building a NAS for professional use, it pays to use the server grade gear. The manufacturers will have done the hard work for you, for only a few bucks more, of providing remote KVM, remote alarming, remote monitoring, and all sorts of other fun stuff.

Somebody has probably hacked together a way to do some of this stuff over IPMB, but from a professional point of view, I wouldn't find having to add some cobbled together Raspberry Pi daughterboard to a server to be a preferred solution, when I can just pay Supermicro a little more to get the -F version of the board I want, and have it built right in.

 

[Sir.Robin]

CPU temp monitoring in the Reporting tab would be great and also beeing able to set max temp and mail alerts like you do for HDD's. :)

 

[jgreco]

Sure it would. Here's a brick. I give it to you so you can go beat on the idiots at Intel, AMD, and the various motherboard mfrs who have given us such a plethora of inconsistent options, resulting in accessing this info via smb, coretemp, ipmi, acpi, proprietary, etc., in degrees F, degrees C, or the awesome "raw value."

The consumer grade equipment is by far the worst. At least with the server grade stuff, we usually get to settle on IPMI for the purpose, but of course that isn't an answer that is going to solve your problem.

Don't think I'm unsympathetic, just been doing this long enough to be bitterly cynical.

 

[Sir.Robin]

Ain't gonna happen in other words. :(

How about implementing it for the server grade stuff then? If that is possible. Then one would have an option at least. Although the work required might not be too rewarding for you guys.
There are some "affordable" server grade mobos even in mATX out there.
Like this one :)
ASUS P8B-M C204 FOR XEON E3-1200 & I3-2100-SERIES ECC S-1155 MATX

 

[jgreco]

Ain't gonna happen in other words. :(

Well, that's pretty pessimistic. The point was simply that what would seem like a simple feature has been made into a bit of an ugly and annoying thing to do. And which temperature do you use? CPU? Other various mainboard sensors? How about fan speed reporting?

I just looked for any tickets on this issue and it looks like the FreeNAS team came to a similar conclusion.

How about implementing it for the server grade stuff then? If that is possible. Then one would have an option at least. Although the work required might not be too rewarding for you guys.

The point is that those of us doing this professionally already have NMS systems (ZenOSS, Munin, Nagios, Zabbix, OpenNMS, etc) and if independent temperature monitoring is important to us, the answer is simply to buy hardware that supports it in a way we can get at it.

Depending on an on-host agent sucks. Finding an appropriate agent to dredge up support for the necessary variables is a pain. What if I'm running an old version of WinXP 64-bit so that I can host some random crudware (cough: vSphere Server)? Or a host running Nexenta? Random Linux distro? OpenBSD? VMware ESXi?

The easy and sensible way for professionals to monitor this stuff is generally out-of-band IPMI, because it makes the monitoring OS-agnostic.

There are some "affordable" server grade mobos even in mATX out there.
Like this one :)
ASUS P8B-M C204 FOR XEON E3-1200 & I3-2100-SERIES ECC S-1155 MATX

You call that "affordable"? I call *this* affordable:

Supermicro X9SCL-F for $152.99

C202 based
3x PCI-e x8 slots (one runs at x4 though)
One 82579LM server-grade ethernet with a secondary 82574L desktop-grade ethernet

So yeah the P8B-M has a PCI-e x16 slot, but it robs lanes from its two x8 slots to make that happen, so basically it's actually a board with two x4 and one x16, and what do you need in a server that runs x16?... And with the lovely dual 82574L it is a step below the X9SCL for network connectivity, although I will concede that with FreeBSD, the 82574L's performance is very good indeed, and the difference between the 82579 and 74 is fairly minimal.

And despite historically being an ASUS shop here, especially all through the '90's, the fact of the matter is that server boards are a side market for ASUS. As we've grown more reliant on the finer points of servers, it has become clear that the manufacturers of consumer grade gear often don't focus heavily on getting details right for server use. So really, if you want a server that's likely to work properly, you have to look towards gear that actually gets deployed and used in server environments: Intel, IBM, HP, Dell, Supermicro. Of those, only Intel and Supermicro offer server boards to end users.

 

[Sir.Robin]

Asus and Supermicro are same price here :)
Thoug i see and agree to your point against Asus. That said, i am using FreeNAS at home and 6 drives will always be enough for me.

About network monitoring.. professionally? So you might have experience with PRTG? Whats your view on that?

 

[cyberjock]

It is rather sad how many people have come up with their "own" configuration, justify it because its "cheap" or "cost friendly" or whatever term suits them, then when all is said and done and the server is setup and running in its final configuration they could have either saved money with a Supermicro board or spent <$40 and ended up with a system that is roughly the same as what they had but had ECC RAM. I'd say more often than not, unless your hardware is free(aka leftovers from the shelf) people should just go straight to Supermicro and not play the games that they do. It's just one of those things where you can plan as best as you can, but sometimes you don't always have the best plan.

No offense to the posters of this thread, just an observation I've noticed from reading these forums for over a year.

 

[jgreco]

Recycling hardware is fun and all, and definitely gives one a "feelgood."

However, ECC is so important for data protection. On a newer system, it helps protect you from bad memory. On an older system, it helps protect you against hardware that is slowly drifting out of spec. Many of the people here will have seen that effect, an inexpensive PC bought four or five years ago that just seems to mysteriously BSOD while running Windows. Often it'll have a marginal power supply or other issues causing bits to randomly go missing or errant. So I would say it is *more* important on an older system.

 

[maurertodd]

I too would like to see temp monitoring on the system info page. The disk temp I'd like available, but not necessarily on the system info page. I remember back in the 0.7 days that the page which displayed the disk status also caused the disks to spin up. I wouldn't want to spin up the disks just to get their temperature.