so my lenovo t420 would keep heating up and then suddenly shutting down. not cool when you have mysql running coz then you got to remove the stale pid. so i finally got round to doing some research and this is what i came up with
the archwiki says to install thinkfan and then configure it. then this page over at lenovo says to use a couple of extra sensors. the end result is my thinkfan.conf now has these extra lines
sensor /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp
sensor /sys/devices/platform/coretemp.0/temp1_input
sensor /sys/devices/virtual/hwmon/hwmon0/temp1_input
and i can hear the fan revving up and down. and that makes me happy
edit: 12/03/2014
after some testing, which is still incomplete, i have come up with this
yum -y install thinkfan
echo "options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/thinkpad_acpi.conf
cp /usr/share/doc/thinkfan/examples/thinkfan.conf.thinkpad /etc/thinkfan.conf
find /sys/devices -type f -name "temp*_input" | xargs -n 1 echo sensor >> /etc/thinkfan.conf
chkconfig thinkfan on
service thinkfan restart
service thinkfan status