smfanctl's Introduction

smfanctl

Fan speed control for Supermicro motherboards to regulate hdd temperatures in a NAS or RAID enclosure. Uses hddtemp daemon and Areca cli64 tool for temperature input, and ipmi extension to set PWM values.

This is a very simple scheme, not a proper PID control loop.

The fan speed is set as follows:

Initial speed is set to something reasonable
Speed is increased/decreased to hold the temperature of the hottest drive (default 30C)
Speed steps are small, (usually 1% pwm), maybe more if swings are large, and no step is made if temperature seems to be moving in the right direction.

Setup

install and configure hddtemp as a daemon (use hddtemp-initd script as example) (test with "nc localhost 7634")
install ipmitool and ensure ipmi-devintf is in kernel modules (test with "sudo ipmitool sensor")
disable SMC fan speed control by setting default fan speed to "Full" in bios or ipmi
for areca controllers, download the command-line configuation tool (cli64) from areca support and copy to this directory

Compiling

setup user that will run smfanctl daemon (not root), make dirs owned by this user
move this directory to /opt/ (so you have /opt/smfanctl), owned by user
create the directory /var/log/opt, owned by user
./compile.sh
test suid helper programs (areca-hwinfo, ipmi-fanctl)

Running

modify smfanctl.py for your setup
- set min pwm of your fans (default 34)
- temp setpoint (default 30C)
- control loop (zones, default pwm etc)
run smfanctl.py as user to test
make it a daemon (use smfanctl-initd script as example, at least modify user)

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