(via www.hollenback.net)
If you have expensive computer systems running in your data center, you want to make sure they keep running smoothly. Server vendors have addressed this by adding system monitoring devices to motherboards to report on temperatures, fan speeds, and voltages.
The standard way to monitor these parameters has traditionally been with tools such as lm_sensors on systems running Linux. However, this mechanism is far from perfect. For starters, it can be incredibly difficult to configure lm_sensors correctly because of poor documentation...