Diagnosing fan problem

[Tore Lund]

Jesse Sheidlower wrote:
> I have a ThinkPad T41p that has had a variety of fan problems
> for some time. After my most recent repair things seemed to be
> working fine, but the other day I was compiling some ports and
> the machine just shut down in the middle; after some
> experimentation it seemed clear that it was just overheating
> under load and shutting itself off. (Looking at the
> temperature sysctl showed that it was getting increasingly hot
> until it crashed.)
> 
> How can I monitor what is happening? Are there any ways I can
> find out from FreeBSD if the fan is even on, or how it thinks
> it is working? "systcl -a | grep fan" didn't return anything.

There are quite a few programs that can tell you CPU temperature and fan
speed, like mbmon and conky, both in /usr/ports/sysutils.  You could
compare these parameters against data for the fan and cooler in order to
ascertain whether anything is wrong with the fan.

> Can I control the fan?

I don't know.  In any case, I would not try to control fan speed if the
problem is that the fan is insufficient or out of order.
-- 
    Tore