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On Tuesday I got lm-sensors working on my singular set of systems. I got Debian Sarge to boot one of them via PXE. The documentation to the motherboard said that lm-sensors works on Red Hat, so I was pretty sure Debian would work too.

Using Debian’s debootstrap package I installed an extra partition with on a separate server with Sarge. In order to use the lm-sensors detection I wanted a kernel that has the I²C configured as much like Debian’s shipped kernel as possible but also be NFS root bootable. I took the latest stable 2.6.x kernel from The Linux Kernel Archives, and the latest 2.6.y kernel configuration file from the latest configured Sarge package; x=6 and y=5 at the time I built them. I made sure CONFIG_ROOT_NFS, CONFIG_IP_PNP_DHCP was on, and the network card was staticly linked too. After building the kernel I installed the modules in the Sarge partition.

I configured an NFS server to export said made Sarge partition with no_root_squash on. Set up TFTP with PXE files. Then set up a DHCP server to boot that system via PXE. Remote booting the system went fine and the sensors-detect command mostly reported accurate information.

I build a kernel with our in-house specifications, included the discovered I²C packages. Now it gleefully reports the CPU temperatures. Even though it feels like I used a jack hammer to plant a daisy, it now works.