[Gllug] clueless at IPMI, hellp!

[Nix]

On 17 May 2009, John Hearns outgrape:
> 2009/5/17 Nix <nix at esperi.org.uk>:
>> On a quasi-unrelated front I've just been exposed to IPMI for the first
>> time and it's somewhat confusing. I have so far completely failed to get
>> IPMI-over-the-network working thru ipmitool. The BMC has a MAC of its
>> own, so presumably it should have an IP of its own as well.
>
> Nix, as you've figured out you can 'talk to' the IPMI card over the
> i2c bus locally, or over the network.

Over *one* NIC, it seems. Of course there is no documentation anywhere
to say which NIC :)

> Could you do an   'ipmitool lan print 1' locally on the box please?

Works now: combined with copying the console to the serial port (scarily
called 'console redirection' in the BIOS although it doesn't *redirect*
anything), this has served to spray my console out of the LAN port.

I'm not sure if I can use the serial port for anything else while I'm
doing this, though, which is annoying as modern machines do not have a
superfluity of them: in fact there's only one serial port on all my new
machines put together, so it seems I have a choice: I can eat it with
console-and-ttyS0-over-the-network (not using the physical port for
anything), or I can keep the console on the disconnected screen and use
it to receive the console messages from my Soekris. It seems I can't use
it for both, and I can't switch over without rebooting, which is
distinctly irritating.

(For now I can connect the console to one of my older machines, with two
serial ports apiece, but they're going to be decommissioned fairly
soon.)

... aha! usb-serial comes to the rescue! Looks like Maplin are selling a
Prolific 2303 (without bothering to say that's what they're selling) for
under ten quid. That should do, although this now means that to get from
one port to the other the signals are passing over serial -> RJ45 ->
serial -> USB...)

> IPMI ports are 623 and  664

This is the default in ipmitool, so I didn't need to mention it in the
end.

> Also, as I remember, you sometimes have to permit lan access on channel 1
> The commands here are:
> ipmitool channel info 1
> ipmitool setaccess 1 ADMIN ipmi=-on link-on
> assuming you use the userid ADMIN

It was on by default in my case.

> Have you also had a good look at the BIOS settings?

Oh yes, right down to the demented and utterly undocumented-save-by-
marketingspeak ones like 'Intel Energy Lake' (apparently some sort of
instant on thing which is supported only by Windows Media Center and
sort of pointless on a server where the RAID card alone takes thirty-odd
seconds to start up. The motherboard manual even describes that option
as 'largely useless'...)
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