Quieting a Dell R710

I have a Dell R710 rev. II that I use in my home office lab homelab running ESXi 6.5. The R710 sits in my office where we work from home. Normally the hum of the R710 fans isn’t terribly bothersome - the 5 fans it houses run at around 3,800 RPM each. The noise is definitely noticeable so I did a little bit of digging into ways I could quiet it down. After looking into replacing the fans with quieter ones I found that I could override the system control of the fans and silence them that way. While I have to monitor the onboard temperatures more closely when disabled, I’ve found little downside to doing so when I’m in there. Here’s how to do it:

The commands used below assume default username / password of root / calvin. Hopefully you’ve changed the default password so substitute yours where applicable.

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