FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1, IPMI and Dell 2850 BMC

[Rob Parker]

Hi all,

I've been trying to get IPMI on a brand new Dell 2850 to work under 
FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1 (FreeBSD 5.4 appears incredibly unstable on these with 
an SMP kernel..). As a newcomer to IPMI, I'm not entirely sure if It's 
me that's doing something wrong, a hardware fault, or a driver issue. I 
have tried a few different things to try and get this to work:

1) Configuring the Dell IPMI BMC with the same (and different) IP 
address to the actual FreeBSD Box (both on the same network, e.g. 
192.168.1.10/24 for IPMI, 192.168.1.11/24 for the actual box).
2) Issuing an IP to the IPMI BMC over DHCP. The IPMI interface collects 
an IP address from my DHCP server, but I still cannot connect to it.
3) Running OpenIPMI and ipmitool directly on the box, nothing happens - 
OpenIPMI's bmc-info tool just sits there doing nothing that I can see, 
ipmitool says it cannot connect.

I have taken a quick look around the network driver code (the 2850 uses 
an em driver), I can see a few mentions of IPMI (and ASF - not sure if 
this is related?), and as far as my limited knowledge of C go, it looks 
like everything should work. I've also tried fudging in a different 
version of the em driver directly from Intel's website (3.1.1.0), but 
these don't seem to work correctly - UDP traffic no longer seems to flow 
in/out of the box with these drivers (perhaps this has something to do 
with IPMI?). I've also tried roughly playing around in the 
"em_enable_mng_pass_thru" function (in if_em_hw.c) to seemingly force 
this to be enabled, but again I end up in a state where no UDP traffic 
seems to flow in/out of the box. As i say - I don't have a great 
knowledge of C, just enough to be dangerous, so it's possible I've 
missed something very obvious. Reading through the Intel documentation 
for the card (and it's EEPROMs) seems to suggest the driver should just 
work as well.

As far as I understand, IPMI (and/or the BMC) are both totally seperate 
from operating system, and should work independently.. when working 
correctly, I should be able to telnet to the IPMI/BMC address on port 
623 and be greeted with some sort of login prompt (please correct me if 
I'm wrong!).

Any information/suggestions/patches/hacks that anyone might have that 
could be of any use at all, would be really appreciated - this has been 
driving me mad all day! Hopefully I've just missed something simple.. :)

Thanks!

rob