IPMI doesn't work...

Jung-uk Kim jkim at niksun.com
Tue Mar 15 13:03:19 PST 2005


On Tuesday 15 March 2005 12:42 pm, Jeff wrote:
> Jung-uk Kim wrote:
> >On Tuesday 15 March 2005 01:14 am, Jeff Behl wrote:
> >>Julian Elischer wrote:
> >>>Jeff wrote:
> >>>>I'm not sure what you mean by in band.  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...
> >>>
> >>>you have to assign it the same address!
> >>
> >>that's not the way it's supposed to work, afaik.  it'd be silly
> >> to tie the BMC address and the OS assigned address together. 
> >> you give the BMC an ip address via a little program that comes
> >> from IBM and this address is independent of the ip address that
> >> whatever os you use on the system assigns to the nic.  the
> >> redbook that Jung-uk sent a link for shows this process if
> >> you're interested.
> >
> >I believe you are correct.  If you have the same IP address, the
> >packet reaches host OS and (I think) it must be discarded by OS.
> >IPMI spec. is very verbose but I found very simple explanation
> > here:
> >
> >http://www.ethereal.com/lists/ethereal-dev/200304/msg00233.html
> >
> >'IPMI messages are encapsulated in Remote Management Control
> > Protocol packets.  RMCP is a UDP-based protocol that uses port
> > 623 for remote system control when the system is in a pre-os or
> > os-absent state. RMCP can also use port 664 for secure traffic.'
> >
> >FYI, IPMI v2.0 defines extended RMCP, so called RMCP+.
> >
> >>like i said earlier, having different ip addresses (the BMC's
> >> being in private address space) works fine with the linux
> >> kernel...
> >
> >Just out of my curiosity, are you using bcm or tg3 driver on
> > Linux?
> >
> >Thanks,
> >
> >Jung-uk Kim
>
> the tg3, according to lsmod.  it looks like the bcm and the tg3
> share common code (tigon3.c is included in the bcm source)...

I just glanced at bcm5700 and tg3 drivers. ;-)  If my guess is 
correct, ASF related registers (grep -i asf *) are controlling this 
function.  Unfortunately it doesn't seem trivial to implement 
something similar for bge(4). :-(

Jung-uk Kim


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