[PLUG] SOL/IPMI

[Larry Brigman]

On 4/6/07, Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Apr 2007, Larry Brigman wrote:
>
> > On 3/12/07, Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com> wrote:
> >>  My little 16-port serial terminal is nearing capacity. I'm willing to
> >>  get another one, but I thought I'd investigate the Serial-over-LAN
> >>  stuff included with IPMIv2.0.
> >>
> >>  Anyone used it? Battle scars? Successes? Hints?
> >
> > We are just getting started using this but it is typically a system
> > hardware support option.  There is a BMC which can be included on
> > the board or may be part of the card cage that the boards plug into.
>
> The machines in question, mostly from Penguin Computing, have BMCs
> with their own (unswitched) connections to the power supplies and
> ethernet jacks.
>
> > This is mainly for racks of headless systems.  We have an six slot
> > ATCA chassis that has two shelf managers which support IPMI 1.5 with
> > some form of serial re-direct but does not support Serial over LAN.
>
> Right. The docs I've been able to find online seem to warn against
> using the (mostly busted) serial support in IPMI 1.5. Supposedly,
> things are better in 2.0, but HOWTOs are in short supply.
>
> > Here is a link I googled a few minutes ago.
> > http://buttersideup.com/docs/howto/IPMI_on_Debian.html
>
> That was one of the first documents I read. It's pretty specific to a
> certain chipset.
>
> I've installed the OpenIPMI stuff and have been able to poll the
> hardware monitors with ipmitool, e.g.,
>
>    [root]# ipmitool sdr type Temperature
>    CPU 1 TEMP       | 22h | ok  |  3.0 | 48 degrees C
>    CPU 2 TEMP       | 23h | ok  |  3.1 | 49 degrees C
>    MEM TEMP         | 24h | ok  |  7.0 | 27 degrees C
>    PWR CONN TEMP    | 25h | ok  |  7.0 | 33 degrees C
>
> I've even been able to locate the proper LAN channels on the machines
> in question (oddly, one does lan on channel 6, while others on are
> channel 2).
>
> I'm more interested in how folks use IPMI as a console interface for
> rebooting, altering BIOS settings, and getting to the boot loader.

There is always the openipmi mailing list.