hddtemp is a great little tool for all those who already experienced hard disk crashes/failures caused by overheating. to prevent future crashes, i’ve hacked a tiny bash-script, hddtempmonitor as a simple wrapper. with this script, i’m “deliberately” on the safe side – preventing a fatal disk failure has priority over maximizing server uptime (at least atm, when time is scarce). for now, it does the job it’s supposed to do, but it really should be improved (feel free to do so). some random points: season awareness, fuzzy logic, adaptation, state awareness, increasing temperature thresholds to prevent possible endless rebooting, moving average, mean, confidence interval, confidence level, combination with external temperature sensor, combination with an ids, selective process kill, command line options instead of hardcoded vars, sms gateway, logging. etc. etc.
the script is called from /etc/crontab:
# mettlerd: hddtempmonitor (hard disk temperature monitor) * * * * * root /usr/local/bin/hddtempmonitor >/dev/null 2>&1