smx10fanctl 0.9.0

A fancontroller for Supermicro boards using IPMI raw commands

smx10fanctl

Smx10fanctl is a fancontroller for Supermicro boards using IPMI raw commands. I created this project because I wanted a quiet homeserver. Supermicro motherboards expects high RPM fans and expects fans that have at least 600RPM minimal.

I am using a Noctua NH-U12DXi4 CPU cooler which has a minimal RPM of 300. When the CPU is around 20-40 degrees Celcius it will start to ramp up the fans because the Supermicro motherboards have threshholds set. This means that the motherboard wants that the fans are running at least a certain configured RPM speed (you can check those thresholds in your IPMI interface). You can lower the thresholds to 0 for example, but Supermicro motherboards are sometimes reading 0 RPM, I can't find an explaination why Supermicro reads 0RPM, but the internet is full of problems with Noctua fans and Supermicro motherboards.

Because the motherboard reads 0RPM, it will start to ramp up the fans again, this goes over and over again, which is really annoying. Therefor I created this CLI tool to control the fan speeds on the OS based on the CPU temperature. This script will only work on Linux distributions.

Tested on

I have developed this script with the following hardware/software.

• Supermicro X10SRH-CF
• Intel Xeon 2680 V4
• Proxmox 6.3.1

Installation

$ pip install smx10fanctl

Configuration

To configure the application make sure that one of the following files exists:

/etc/smx10fanctl/smx10fanctl.yml
~/.config/smx10fanctl/smx10fanctl.yml
~/.smx10fanctl/config/smx10fanctl.yml
~/.smx10fanctl.yml
./.smx10fanctl.yml

The application will read those configuration files in that order. So ./.smx10fanctl.yml will overwrite /etc/smx10fanctl/smx10fanctl.yml'. For a full list of options and their description see .smx10fanctl-example.yml in this repository.

Development

This project includes a number of helpers in the Makefile to streamline common development tasks.

Environment Setup

The following demonstrates setting up and working with a development environment:

### create a virtualenv for development

$ make virtualenv

$ source env/bin/activate


### run smx10fanctl cli application

$ smx10fanctl --help