thermal kill switch

[Joel Jaeggli]

On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, Andre Lehovich wrote:

> We had the air-conditioning fail yesterday.  Caught it in
> time to shut down by hand, but we won't be so lucky next
> time.  RGB's book recommends a thermal kill switch, but
> doesn't give details on implementation.  One obvious idea is
> to have a daemon monitor lm-sensors and shutdown each node
> as it gets too hot.  This is easy and cheap.

most server mainboards can be set to kill the machines off at a certain 
threshhold at the very minimum. shutting down gracefully is more 
desireable in terms of the state of your disk.
 
> But, is there anything better?  We have not yet had the
> electric and cooling contractors refit our server room.

having one fitted to your epo (Emergency power off) bus ought to be fairly 
straight forward. That ought to kill everything at once.

also, having your chillers/ac integrated into your monitoring system, goes 
a long way towards catching it in time.

>  Is
> there anything we should have them install during the
> rewiring?  What are the pros/cons of a room-wide kill switch
> vs. the lm-sensors approach?

the big problem is if you have it set to a high enough threshhold that 
you won't accidentaly set it off say 45 or 50c it won't shut off fast 
enough to prevent hardware damage.


> Thanks,
> --Andre
> 
> 
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