Boot prompt for Intel AMT

[Charles Sprickman]

On Mon, 5 Mar 2007, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 12:15:04AM +0300, Artem Kuchin wrote:
>> The othe question, is there such technology for Supermicro mainboards?
>
> Yes, Supermicro makes IPMI add-on cards (they require IPMI capability on
> the mainboard, however).
>
> Be warned about these cards, however.  A friend of mine at Yahoo!  has
> encountered a major BIOS/IPMI oversight, where in the case that the IPMI
> event log becomes full, the system BIOS upon boot will _require_ someone
> hit F1 to continue on the console, until the IPMI history is cleared.
> Ultimately this requires someone to go to the datacenter and manually
> hit F1 on the console, clear the IPMI log, and let the machine boot up.
> Wonderful oversight.

I might also add that we tried that on a few Supermicro boxes and found 
the whole mess to be not as reliable as you'd like an OOB management tool 
to be.  The java client is spotty at best, really wants to be run in 
Windows, and basically falls apart when doing simple console redirection 
in the client.  Never really saw it work well.

> Now it seems more and more problems are coming to light with vendor IPMI
> implementations (Broadcom's pseudo-iLO causes ARP storms because there
> is no dedicated NIC for iLO and the NIC technically has two MAC
> addresses, Supermicro's IPMI and the event log problem, yadda yadda.)

Yeah, I was a little disappointed in this - when I read about IPMI I 
thought that it was something of a standard and that I'd be able to pick 
and choose clients that run natively on FreeBSD or OS-X.  That does not 
seem to be the case at all.

> Seems to me the only vendors who got this right were 1) HP/Compaq with
> their true iLO/iLO2, and 2) Sun.

Which is a shame as the Supermicro cards were sub-$100...

Charles

> -- 
> | Jeremy Chadwick                                 jdc at parodius.com |
> | Parodius Networking                        http://www.parodius.com/ |
> | UNIX Systems Administrator                   Mountain View, CA, USA |
> | Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
>
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