After discussing a few things with Chris last night and his concerns of leaving a computer on while he is out of town and it over heating and failing or having drives fail, because of the AC being off due to him being gone. I told him I could write a script to monitor the temperature of the machine and shut it down if it needed to be. Also that I could have do some graphing of the temperature of the machine using lm-sensors and MRTG.

So today I got to geek out a bit and setup MRTG with temperature monitoring on a server, I actually grabbed and modified a perl script from this how to for configuring exactly what I was doing. I also wrote another script to gracefully shutdown the server if the temperature of the specified thermistor gets above a preset limit. Ya lots of main boards could just cut the power or sound an alarm but what if nobody is there to hear the alarm? Not to mention cutting the power and making the system do a non graceful shutdown can cause other problems.