I feel silly, should've investigated more. Here is the answer just incase I mess this up or anyone else has the same problem. Also, many thanks to @Fiisch for advice and pointing me in the right direction.
When starting fancontrol via #service fancontrol start
or #fancontrol
, the errors of /usr/sbin/fancontrol are not printed. Due to motherboard limitations, my sensors are defined as absolute paths. So I ran /usr/sbin/fancontrol. This causes the error
Configuration is too old, please run pwmconfig again
So I decided to take a look at /usr/sbin/fancontrol to see why. I found the cause at lines 302-307:
# Check for configuration change if [ -z "$DEVPATH" -o -z "$DEVNAME" ] then echo "Configuration is too old, please run pwmconfig again" >&2 exit 1 fi
Its just a simple configuration change detector! since, I had specified the absolute paths for my sensors, not only was this not necessary, it was actually causing the error. So I just commented it out.
## Check for configuration change #if [ -z "$DEVPATH" -o -z "$DEVNAME" ] #then # echo "Configuration is too old, please run pwmconfig again" >&2 # exit 1 #fi
That was it! fancontrol works perfectly now and starts at boot time.