[Discuss] IPMI network connection

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey)]

> From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org [mailto:discuss-
> bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On Behalf Of John Malloy
> 
> Has anyone out done much with configuring IPMI network connections?
> 
> Is this similar to ILO  (Hewlett Packard Integrated Lights-Out)?
> 
> Would this help Kurt Keville with his issue  " How can I resume from
> S1 (STR) mode in Ubuntu?"?

Depends on what you want to do.  For the last 2-3 years, we've been
configuring all our Dell/Sun/Apple machines to enable the ilom/bmc/ipmi for
the sake of (at minimum) remote power on/off.  Different devices have
different functionality...  One thing they all do is power on/off.  Some
provide monitoring services or remote console, etc.  

Contrary to Daniel's comments, ours have been 100% reliable, except in one
case, where we were running an unsupported OS (solaris 10) on a Dell with
unsupported NIC (on-board broadcom.)  The problem went away when we added an
Intel NIC.

On most of our systems, we're allowing the ipmi interface to "share" the
primary ethernet interface.  It behaves as if there's a 2-way tiny little
ethernet switch embedded, with a tiny little system on a different mac
address and different IP.

You can always configure it by using some sort of keypress during power-on.
But that's a hassle, especially if you have a 20-character random hex
encryption key.  The preferred way to configure it is by using the ipmi-tool
after the OS is installed.  But that's not always possible ... Case and
point ... ESXi doesn't have ipmi-tool.  It is easier to type the 20-char hex
string once than it is to launch a minimal version of linux for this
purpose...  At least ... Maybe booting from a removable drive, or PXE, or
iscsi device might be the easiest.  I don't know.