Conky and hard disk temps.

[philinux]

I got two temps from laptop but not hard drive.

Disks utility can see it no problem. But hddtemp needs sudo. If disks can see it what is it using. I can use that then.
Maybe have to look at disks source code.

Anyone sorted this without resorting to sudoers etc etc.

[ajgreeny]

Here's the line I use in my .conkyrc file to get hddtemp showing the temperature of the disk

Disk Temperature:        ${execi 60 hddtemp /dev/sda | cut -c 30-32} C

You may need to change the figures I use in the "pipe to cut" to suit your system hardware without extraneous text.

To get the output of hddtemp to show without using sudo you can simply change the mode of the hddtemp executable with command

sudo chmod u+s /usr/sbin/hddtemp

which allows it to run as user.

I do the same for vnstat output in conky, with the exception being that the executable for that is in /usr/bin not /usr/sbin

[philinux]

Ah righto that seems safe enough. I still wonder how Disks gets it though.

[r-senior]

Another way is to run hddtemp as a daemon and get the data from it using netcat:

http://linux.die.net/man/8/hddtemp

See 'Tcp/Ip Daemon Mode'

Being curious, I had a quick poke around in the code for the gnome-disks program and it uses 'udisks_drive_ata_get_smart_temperature()' from the udisks library to get the temperatures, i.e. it is not using a command line utility, it goes straight to the udisks daemon.

http://udisks.freedesktop.org/docs/latest/

However ... there is a command line utility called udisks that should give you hours of fun with Conky because it shows all the SMART data -- temperatures, power cycle counts, power on time.

$ udisks --show-info /dev/sda

[philinux]

Nice one r-senior this works a treat.

udisks --show-info /dev/sda | grep temp | cut -c 52-53

[edit] this is now working in conky. ${execi 60 udisks --show-info /dev/sda | grep temp | cut -c 52-54}

[Mopar1973Man]

After installing the hddtemp daemon you can use the hddtemp variable from Conky.

http://conky.sourceforge.net/variables.html

[r-senior]

Nice! For anyone whose daemon is not started:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure hddtemp

This also gives the option of making hddtemp suid root.

[philinux]

Question is how come udisks doesn't need sudo but hddtemp does. I'd be interested if anyone knows.

[stinkeye]

Question is how come udisks doesn't need sudo but hddtemp does. I'd be interested if anyone knows.

Don't know the answer to that one, but r-senior's answer, installing hddtemp with the SUID, allowing it to be run by regular users
is the way to use hddtemp with conky.

Then you can just use in conky...

${execpi 10 hddtemp -n /dev/sda}

To change color according to temperature you can also send it to a colorize script...
ColorTempHDD.sh

#!/bin/bash
# colorize.sh
# by: Crinos512

COOL=25
WARM=50

if [[ $1 < $COOL ]]
   then echo "\${color7}"$1    # COOL
elif [[ $1 > $WARM ]]
   then echo "\${color9}"$1    # HOT
else echo "\${color8}"$1       # WARM
fi

exit 0

Set your temp ranges.
Define color7, color8 and color9 in your conky config or change "color7" etc to a color in the script...eg "color FF0000" or "color red"

eg this is my conky line...

${execpi 10 hddtemp -n /dev/sda | xargs /home/glen/conky/ColorTemp/ColorTempHDD.sh}°C

You can use copies of the same script to colorize cpu and gpu temps.

[philinux]

I decided to do away with hddtemp and use this.

${execi 60 udisks --show-info /dev/sda | grep temp | cut -c 52-54}

Seems to work well.