topic Re: Fetching Cabinet Temperature in Operating System - HP-UX

Fetching Cabinet Temperature

Ralph Grothe — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:47:21 GMT

Hi Experts,

I would like to inquire whether there exists an easy (viz. scriptable) way/interface to poll various systems' components temperatures of our hpux enterprise servers.
I know that the respective EMS monitor is already doing this, but I would like to poll every five minutes by a Munin custom plug-in (i.e. script) the temps so that I could chart them and set my own thresholds when notifications or event handling should be due.
I know that there exist an C API for the EMS system and docs how to write one's own agents and monitors but for my little purpose this simply would be overkill and would require time and expertise for an implementation that I cannot afford.
As said, it should be doable by some wee shell or Perl script an uninitiated sysadmin like myself can quickly tinker up.

Regards
Ralph

Re: Fetching Cabinet Temperature

Duncan Edmonstone — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 06:55:28 GMT

Ralph,

To the best of my knowledge there's no way to get at this data. envd generates EMS events when certain thresholds are reached, but thats your lot... have a look at my post here:

http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1152740

Why would you want to do this anyway? Measuring anything associated with Data Centre temperature on a temp sensor that is _in_ a server does not make much sense to me.... if the individual server is sarting to get too hot, you'll get an EMS alert anyway.

HTH

Duncan

Re: Fetching Cabinet Temperature

Ralph Grothe — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:38:55 GMT

Hi Duncan,

the wish/idea to chart the cabinet temp per server came from an admin colleague because he was intrigued by, given the simplistic approach, the valuable long-term charts that the Munin master produced which helped him spot changes or outages which otherwise usually got unnoticed.
As we have a few servers that more often emit EMS notifications from a monitor's sensed too high intake temperature he found it would be nice to long-term chart their temp curves.
Of course do we also have temp and humidity environment sensors in the rooms of our data center of whom my Nagios and Munin SNMP plug-ins poll those values.
But to be honest, I don't even know where exactly these sensors are currently positioned in the rooms (I would have to ask a colleague) while I quite well know where "my" servers are located.
I know, this sounds pretty weird.

Re: Fetching Cabinet Temperature

Court Campbell — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:48:29 GMT

Ralph,

I posted this awhile back:

http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1323547

Do you think you night be available to help me out with this? I know you have done a lot of work with munin and HPUX, any help would be appreciated.

Re: Fetching Cabinet Temperature

Torsten. — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:13:07 GMT

Hi Ralph,

see my post here:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1326165

The conclusion is that obviously the providers used by the system management homepage are able to read the sensor values - so if you know how to "ask" the providers you will probably get your results.

Re: Fetching Cabinet Temperature

Ralph Grothe — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:06:55 GMT

Hi Court,

since Munin is written entirely in Perl it should be relatively easy to get a munin-node running on any platform that Perl supports.
Remember that the munin-node script relies on the CPAN module Net::Server

see
http://search.cpan.org/~rhandom/Net-Server-0.97/lib/Net/Server.pod

So you need to get this installed first.
I usually do this by the CPAN interface from my local Mini::CPAN mirror which checks every friday a near by CPAN mirror on the Internet for updates and loads them on my repository.
This module Mini::CPAN is also quite useful.
With it you get all the latest releases of all CPAN modules and they still would fit on a CDROM (or USB stick, which is handy if you need some module while you're offline)

The issue with a HP-UX munin-node is usually due to the poor integration of this platform as far as the standard plug-ins are concerned that come with the Munin tarball.
That's because the project developers seem to lack HP hardware.
During the make most official plug-ins with the autoconf attribute in the header will be skipped because the respective plug-in will not work out of the box on HP-UX.
With a little shell or Perl scripting you can customize any plug-in so that it will work on HP-UX as well.
Alternatively, you can look at Munin Exchange if someone has submitted their plug-in for HP-UX.

http://muninexchange.projects.linpro.no/

Or I could share you some of mine, although they were never written with "official" distribution and maintenance in mind, and thus probably are too buggy or awkward?

Re: Fetching Cabinet Temperature

Shinji Teragaito_1 — Mon, 04 May 2009 23:23:03 GMT

I think ipmitool may be useful for your purpose. The source code is
available from the sourceforge site:
http://ipmitool.sourceforge.net/

It's easy to build it from the source code.

If "IPMI over LAN" is enabled in the MP configurations, I can
have the following result:

% ./ipmitool -I lan -H -P "" sdr type Temperature
Ambient Temp | D8h | ok | 23.1 | 16 degrees C
Processor 0 Temp | D9h | ok | 3.1 | 53 degrees C
Processor 1 Temp | DAh | ns | 3.2 | Disabled
%

Hope this helps you,

Shinji