CrudVision - Lisa Seelye

May 11, 2008

Graphing Hard Disk Temperatures with rrdtool (part 2)

Filed under: gentoo, graphs, monitoring, rrdtool, ruby — Lisa Seelye @ 5:03 pm

Last month I made a post about using rrdtool and ruby to graph hard disk temperatures. I recently had some hardware trouble and something with permissions went crazy. Today I took the time to look into the problem and fix it.

The /dev/hd[egik] device nodes were owned by root:disk and 660. However, the hddtemp binary was trying to do some restricted ioctl operations. Even though the binary was setuid and my non-root user was in the disk group I couldn’t access the disk to get the temperatures.

I found out that there is a hddtemp daemon which can query the disks for my unpriveleged user.

The daemon listens on a TCP port and provides output like this:

|/dev/hde|ST3160811AS|39|C||/dev/hdg|ST3160811AS|40|C||/dev/hdi|ST3160811AS|38|C||/dev/hdk|ST3160815AS|39|C|

Should be easy to modify my disk_temperature.rb to connect to that port and parse the data.

Now my temperature graphs will have new data (as soon as the change is made).

July 11, 2007

Four years with Gentoo

Filed under: gentoo, linux, work — Lisa Seelye @ 7:15 am

Just over four years ago I was given CVS commit access to the Gentoo portage tree. It’s been quite a dramatic time and it’s been very enlightening. The people I’ve met have been really nifty! Most of my the things that I maintain are stable. My main regret is that due to work completely sucking up my time I don’t have much left over at the end of the day for Gentoo.

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