[rescue] E250 temperatures

[Joshua Boyd]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 02:04:18PM -0700, Ron Wickersham wrote:

> so i show a slower fan and lower temperatures.   i've been worried that
> my room temperature is too high at around 75-degrees F, but have never
> gotten a temp warning light in the five years this machine has been running.

According to the owners manual, the light comes on if any of the chip
sensors hit 60c or if the ambiant sensors hit 53c.  Shut down occurs
when a chip hits 65c.
 
> i am running both power supplies and 3 disk drives.

I am using one PSU and 6 disks.  And they aren't particularly cool disks
either.  

Maybe I should try swapping 3 or them for cooler ones.

> the two CPUs are the same...are your CPUs different?   this machine
> is running Solaris 10 with 12 zones and in some of the zones there
> are 20 virtual hosts of apache, and some heavy usage in perl scripts
> for bulletin board system called Discus, so the perfmeter frequently
> shows both CPUs maxed out and the load average up to ten so the
> machine isn't just sitting idle.

My machine mostly sits idle.  It has close to 1.75 gigs of ram.  It runs
1 zone.  It has dual 300 CPUs instead of dual 400s.
 
> when you have the machine apart, i'd check that all three fans are
> putting out the same volume of air, feeling the flow with your hand
> should be adequate for that.  i could imagine that if one fan were
> running slower then the lower airflow could make a difference on the
> parts cooled by it.

It feels to me like the middle fan puts out more air then the side
fans.  The middle one goes over the CPUs, one side fan covers the RAM,
and the remaining side fan covers the PCI cards (1 GigE card, and 1 dead
FC card.  I should have removed the FC card, but I didn't think about it
until I was connecting it back into the rack.
 
> what kind of computational load are you running?

Generally very little.  This machine doesn't serve anything publicly.
It just serves files (which means it doesn't do much of that when my
wife and I aren't home), serves CVS (that I use from work sometimes, but
not heavily), and that is it on a day to day basis.

>From time to time, I feed it a picture processing load (imagemagick
scripts) that max the CPUs and takes hours to run.
 
> >Below the e250 is a smartups 1400.
> 
> is the e250 laying down in the rack-mount orientation or standing up in the
> "normal" orientation shown in the product pictures?   and assuming that
> you have the side panels on the e250 which make the airflow go the way
> intended by the design.

It is a rack mounted configuration.  I would assume I have the proper
side panels for rack mounting.
 
> >The only things running above it are
> >a SS20, a GigE switch, and a FastE switch (the FC array, T1, and Compaq
> >DL360 are off).  On top of the rack is a Ultra 5, and a few feet away is
> >an Ultra 80, which doesn't seem to have the same sort of monitoring on
> >it.  I may have to get a remote device to monitor the area...
> 
> in feeling the e250 there is no warmth from anyside of the side panels,
> the airflow keeps the case absolutely at room temperature.   so i can't
> imagine that any gear either above or below would affect its temperature 
> in any measureable way.


It was probably the dust in the fan tray.  There was still a lot of
airflow, but after cleaning the fans (which I hadn't previously realized
were removable), there is still more air moving out the back of the box.

At this point, my fan is still running faster than yours, but the CPUs
are slightly cooler than yours.  prstat shows a load of 0.03 on the
machine.