IPMI doesn't work...

[Jung-uk Kim]

On Monday 14 March 2005 07:32 pm, Jeff wrote:
> Jung-uk Kim wrote:
> >On Monday 14 March 2005 02:32 pm, Jeff wrote:
> >><posted this to -questions too but thought the nic component made
> >>it worth posting to -net>
> >>
> >>on a 5.3 amd64 system.  anyone have any luck or know anything
> >> about this?  i can query variables right up until the point
> >> where the kernel loads, then nothing.  ibm is saying this can be
> >> caused by the actual nic driver (the Baseboard Management
> >> Controller (BMC) shares the network interface); the system uses
> >> a Broadcom BCM5704C Dual gig adapter:
> >>
> >>bge0: <Broadcom BCM5704C Dual Gigabit Ethernet, ASIC rev. 0x2003>
> >>mem 0xfe000000-0xfe00ffff,0xfe010000-0xfe01ffff irq 24 at device
> >>1.0 on pci2
> >
> >Does 'in-band' mode work for you?  Try FreeIPMI to check:
> >
> >http://www.gnu.org/software/freeipmi/
> >http://www.freshports.org/sysutils/freeipmi/
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by in band.

What you are trying to do is so called 'out-of-band', i. e., remote 
console.  'In-band' is local.

> The IP address of the BMC is assigned via the bios and is different
> from what the OS later assigns. With imiptool we can turn
> on/powercycle/monitor via the BMC assigned address up until the
> point where the kernel loads.  Once it does, the BMC no longer
> responds.  This doesn't happen with the two linux distros we've
> tried it on.  Wtih both, including SuSE, we can still query/control
> via the BMC using ipmitool.  It seems to be some sort of driver
> issue to me.  I find it confusing that the NIC is shared between the
> BMC and the OS, but I guess that's just how it's done.  Perhaps the
> bsd broadcomm driver is simply blocking this somehow...

I believe bge(4) is not blocking anything.  IPMI spec. says:

'From the IPMI point-of-view, the interface to the network controller 
is dedicated to the BMC. <SNIP!!!> If the network controller is 
shared between system software and the BMC, this generally 
accomplished via special hardware in the network controller that 
enable BMC traffic and system traffic to be interleaved.'

I guess we are scrubbing off this 'special' hardware bit while 
initializing. :-(

Jung-uk Kim

> jeff