Collectd

I’m kind of back in the mining arena. Like everyone else nowadays, I’m mining Ethereum with a couple of R9 290 & 290X graphic cards I bought second-hand.
So far everything works as intended, but as a proper control freak, I need to know what’s happening in real-time, what’s my firepower, how’s the mining doing etc…
Like many, I use a mining pool, ethermine to be precise, and those guys had the good taste of exposing a JSON API.
Using collectd-python capabilities, I was able to write a short python script that feeds:

pkgsrc’s collectd does not support the thermal plugin, so in order to publish thermal information I had to use the exec plugin:

LoadPlugin exec
# more plugins

<Plugin exec>
        Exec "nobody:nogroup" "/home/imil/bin/temp.sh"
</Plugin>

And write this simple script that reads CPUs temperature from NetBSD’s envstat command:

$ cat bin/temp.sh 
#!/bin/sh

hostname=$(hostname)
interval=10

while :
do
        envstat|awk '/cpu[0-9]/ {printf "%s %s\n",$1,$3}'|while read c t
        do
                echo "PUTVAL ${hostname}/temperature/temperature-zone${c#cpu} interval=${interval} N:${t%%.*}"
        done
        sleep ${interval}
done

I then send those values to an influxdb server:

I recently added a fantastic graphing tool named facette to pkgsrc. Facette knows how to pull data sources from various backends, and among them, the famous collectd.

In this article, we will see how to setup both on NetBSD but keep in mind it should also work for any platform supported by pkgsrc.

First up, collectd installation. It can be done either with pkgin (binary installation) or pkgsrc (source installation):

• with pkgin

$ sudo pkgin in collectd collectd-rrdtool

• with pkgsrc

 $ cd /usr/pkgsrc/sysutils/collectd
 $ sudo make install clean
 $ cd ../collectd-rrdtool
 $ sudo make install clean

Tune up a minimal collectd configuration