PHPSysInfo and LM-Sensors

I wanted to get phpsysinfo working with the hardware sensors suite known as lm-sensors, but I really didn’t feel like working through all the problems myself. But, despite my attempts to be lazy, I actually had to work a little bit at this.

First of all, this is running on an Ubuntu Server 9.10 x86 – 2.6.31-14-generic-pae to be exact – using an old Dell Precision 360 box to be even more exact. I installed phpsysinfo version 2.5.4 and edited the config.php file to enable lm-sensors hardware monitoring.

Unfortunately I get this error when I navigate to http://myserverip/phpsysinfo:

No sensors found!
Make sure you loaded all the kernel drivers you need.
Try sensors-detect to find out which these are.
Return value: 0

Wonderful. So I have to install lm-sensors. Now another site told me to do the following:
sudo apt-get install lm-sensors i2c-tools read-edid sensord hddtemp sensors-applet
After the lengthy download (153MB I believe), hddtemp needed some input. The defaults are fine – I selected to start the hddtemp service every reboot and run it on the default port 7634 as this is an internal only server. If it’s an externally facing server you may want to exercise some caution when opening ports.

You can verify that this is working by navigating to http://yourserverip:7634
In my case I see:

|/dev/sg0|ST380011A|38|C||/dev/sda|ST380011A|38|C|

Which I can see the Seagate HD that’s 80GB IDE with two mount points running at 38C (100.4F).

Now to setup for other sensors. Go back to your terminal session and type:
sudo sensors-detect
Hit YES for everything. When the script finishes you should probably reboot:
reboot

Reload your http://yourserverip/phpsysinfo page – you should now see a bunch of other stuff added at the bottom:
lm-sensors

Remove Annoying Logon Background Image

I had to RDP to a server several times before this actually started to bother me:
Dell has their own image set as the default background during the login prompt. RDP over the internet enough and the slow loading of the background starts to eat away at you.

It’s a simple registry hack to fix it:

Start – Run
regedit
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Desktop
Find a key named Wallpaper
Change the key’s data to (None) instead of C:\windows\dellcrap\dellcrapimage.bmp
Close out of the registry editor
Wait a few minutes and it should be gone when you try to login.

This worked on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.