thermal grease

2016-02-01

Before and After

After rebuilding my home server, my primary fear was death by over heating.

The first utility I setup was Munin, as well as loading the thermal sensor KLD’s:

root@server:~ # kldload coretemp
root@server:~ # kldstat 
Id Refs Address            Size     Name
 1   12 0xffffffff80200000 179ddd8  kernel
 2    1 0xffffffff8199e000 4a50     coretemp.ko
 3    1 0xffffffff81a11000 1f1698   zfs.ko
 4    1 0xffffffff81c03000 3331     opensolaris.ko
 root@server:~ # dmesg
Jan 24 16:35:20 server kernel: coretemp0: <CPU On-Die Thermal Sensors> on cpu0
Jan 24 16:35:20 server kernel: coretemp1: <CPU On-Die Thermal Sensors> on cpu1
Jan 24 16:36:21 server kernel: ichsmb0: <Intel 82801GB (ICH7) SMBus controller> port 0x4000-0x401f irq 19 at device 31.3 on pci0
Jan 24 16:36:21 server kernel: smbus0: <System Management Bus> on ichsmb0
Jan 24 16:36:23 server kernel: smb0: <SMBus generic I/O> on smbus0

After a week of operating, I decided to take it down for maintenance, and re-apply new thermal grease.

The end result was a great reminder to redo your cheap stock thermal grease annually. Now I don’t have to listen to the CPU fan spin up constantly while the kids are on their minecraft server.