Restart fan manually in Linux

Question

I am facing issues with Thinkpad T410's fan. Now and then my fan stops working (meaning 0 rpm).

Long time, the only solution for me was to shutdown (not to restart, instead power off) the system and then boot again. (Which is, what you can guess, not a good solution. Sometimes I even had to cancel cpu-heavy tasks, to avoid data corruption, because of the systems rescue shutdown, when the temp goes higher than 100 °C.)

I found out that going in suspend mode also helps bringing the fan back to work. I would like to know which processes are started when the computer is "coming back" from suspend mode, so I can force the fan to start again without even going to suspend mode.

To make sure: I don't want to control the fan itself, but I want it to "restart" manually.

Answer 1

Using the following line allows me to restart the fan without suspending my laptop.

echo disable | sudo tee /proc/acpi/ibm/fan; sleep 5; echo enable | sudo tee /proc/acpi/ibm/fan

Thanks to @Stephen Harris

Answer 2

Also, if you're going to be doing this in a daily basis (as I am, for example), I'll recommend adding it as an alias in your machine.

In my case, I added it as the "restartfan" alias.

You can do so by adding the alias to the .bashrc file in your home directory. This also depends on your particular configuration.

I have my aliases in a separate file called .bash_aliases as the .bashrc file recommends:

# You may want to put all your additions into a separate file like
# ~/.bash_aliases, instead of adding them here directly.

If you're not sure how to set up an alias, here's a thorough article explaining it: https://phoenixnap.com/kb/linux-alias-command

For me this is more practical.

Thanks to @stackunderflow for his answer. It was a live saver.