Ok so just the other week I was hearing these seemingly random beeps and blinks on my main
gateway and
network server,
tail -fing the
/var/adm/messages and
syslog did not really give me any complaints from the machine that would correspond to these
beeps and blinks.
Suspecting that something might be physically wrong with the machine I then tried to feel for that warm flow of air that normally blows out of the chassis fan at the rear. To my shock, there was none! The dust caked up so bad and the heat probably wrecked the ball bearings of the cooling fan and left it fubar.
I hurriedly sud into root and brought the system down and went into the BIOS to see the figures on the hardware monitor. To my further shock and horror, the on chip CPU thermometer diode reported that the temperature was at 96 degrees...CENTIGRADE!
This was caused mostly by the fact that the chassis fan died and the entire casing had become a turbo broiler, and each and every one of those now no longer mysterious beeps and blinks was my Asus P3BF motherboard indicating that the chip was reaching 100 deg C!
I could not very well kill the system as that would mean a terrible inconvenience to my network users so I just opened the casing, made the chassis fan to work, though at a slow rate and at great noise and vibration, and proceeded to boot back into linux making sure to kill all cron entries for such processor intensive applications like SETI@Home.
A service interruption announcement was very soon then sent out to all subscribers via SMS and I just waited for the morning to come.
Next day, being unsuccesful at getting a replacement for the fubared chassis fan I then explored other possible solutions settling on using a bathroom exhaust fan attached to the side panel on which I would make a rather large vent for it to suck out the hot air.
Operation cool server was huge success and I can't be prouder of my work than I have been today.
Sure it is unsightly, seeing an otherwise fine looking ATX tower casing with that huge ass fan attached to its side, eternally sucking the hot air out but it damn works!
I don't have the lm_sensors programs working yet but just by feeling the chassis all around, I can tell that that my solution worked. The hard drives don't heat up anymore, the power supply is not even as hot as it was when it still had the fan working and I no longer hear any beeps or blinks (which is undocumented in the Asus manual btw) even while running at 100% cpu utilization (SETI@Home) and screening Trainspotting using the DivX player on Xfree86!
Thank you and goodnight!