Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!decwrl!bacchus.pa.dec.com!kmeyer
From: kmeyer@wrl.dec.com (Kraig Meyer)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Network Temperature Protocol
Message-ID: <1990Jul23.201937.6154@wrl.dec.com>
Date: 23 Jul 90 20:19:37 GMT
References: <9007210040.AA28109@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Sender: news@wrl.dec.com (News)
Organization: DEC Western Research Lab
Lines: 35

In article <> J.Crowcroft@CS.UCL.AC.UK (Jon Crowcroft) writes:
||As part of a distributed computing experiment, we are considering
||setting up a Sun workstation, with a bi-metallic strip and small coil
||tempearture device, and providing a network wide reading, combined
||with time of day service and cartesian location data.

The idea of being able to find out about a network node's environment
has some good network management potential.  Back when I was at Merit
helping build the original Merit nodes, we started to design a module
which would sense temperatures in and and nearby the processor cabinet.
The idea was that an alarm in the NOC would sound when the temperature
was outside of an appropriate range, and the NOC could call a human to
either turn up the A/C, plug in a fan, or turn the node off.  (A fair 
number of our original campus backbone nodes were in poorly cooled phone
closets, broom closets, *steam tunnels*, etc. at the Univ. of Michigan).

We also toyed with the idea of hooking up a computerized weather station
to the RS-232 ports on some of our upstate nodes--we had found an 
extremely high correlation between certain DDS lines going out and 
thunderstorms on the western edge of the state.  Might give us enough
time to warn users :-)

Neither project ever came to fruition, but I seem to remember that there
were a couple sources for RS-232 interfaced weather stations (Edmund
Scientific, perhaps?)   And a simple temperature gauge is easy and 
relatively inexpensive to build--all that is needed is the appropriate 
thermistor, a basic analog-digital converter and some random electronics.
If I remember correctly, you could hook the appropriate thermistor directly
to the game paddle port on an Apple II and get relatively accurate temperature
readings (and you could, of course, locate the thermistor any place you
wanted).
*****************************************************************************
Kraig Meyer                                                kmeyer@wrl.dec.com
On parole from the University of Southern California.     All views expressed
are my own and may or may not be the same as those of Digital Equipment Corp.