Full control over your G11-G12-G13-G14 Dell servers' cooling, iDrac6-7-8-9

[Keexrean]

Hi everyone!

 

Some of you, like I do, don't actually have a room or a closet dedicated to their servers.

Some of you, like I do, don't have a basement or a garage so they can tuck them away from the living space.

 

Some of you, especially myself, even sleep in the same room as their open rack. Yup.

 

 

And even if you don't, you may have environmental conditions, or noise requirements, that are way different than what the handful of cooling profile available in iDrac are initially made and tuned for.

That's exactly for that reason I basically made myself an assortment of scripts to have my servers' cooling managed automatically, but from parameters I can fine tune.

 

You will find in this github repository the script as I published it make to be standalone* and can be ran on unraid as-is as a cron job, eventually through the user-scripts plugin.

*unlike the ones I actually use, that are very setup-specific (detailed in the README.md).

 

The fancontrol.sh script basically gives you everything you need, I tried to detail it step by step in the commented notes, and should provide you every indication needed to use it.

I would though advise you to read carefully the README.md, since it contains also warnings concerning the fact of running the script on the same machine it is controlling the cooling of.

Mind the requirements also and annotations. If you're on iDrac Express for example, an upgrade might be doable on the cheap.

 

 

If you want to go a bit more in depth with what you can do with iDrac on these generations of servers and IPMI tools, you can find here a little explicative summary of stuff and commands I know about iDrac, since these decade old resources are slowly disappearing and scattered across the web, or even only findable through web.archive.org 's wayback machine.

 

 

 

I'm in no way an expert, and completely open to being schooled constructively. That's what forks and pullrequests are for on github.

 

 

EDIT:

The script have been improved a lot with the revisions 3 and 4. A guide for unraid beginners have been added.

Edited March 3, 2022 by Keexrean
R3-R4