SuperMicro IPMI/SOL and ipmitool troubles

[Daniel O'Connor]

On 12 Nov 2014, at 19:43, Andreas Nilsson <andrnils at gmail.com> wrote:
> unclear is the word for it :) And thanks for looking into this. ipmi/ilo is
> important on a server os.
> 
> I found a reference to it in a ML post:
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2013-February/072464.html

I started that thread :)
I did get it working on the hardware I was using (Supermicro X9SCL-F and X8SIL-F)

I used the following BIOS settings
	• Remote Access - Enabled
	• Serial Port Number - COM3
	• Serial Port Mode - 115200, 8, n, 1
	• Flow Control - Hardware
	• Redirection After BIOS POST - Always
	• Terminal Type - VT100
	• VT-UTF8 Combo Key Support - Disabled
	• Sredir Memory Display Delay - No Delay

And the following in loader.conf
# Give preference to VGA console
console="vidconsole,comconsole"
# Uncomment below and comment above to give serial console preference
#console="comconsole,vidconsole"
comconsole_speed="115200"
boot_multicons="YES"
hint.uart.0.flags="0x0"
hint.uart.2.at="isa"
hint.uart.2.port="0x3E8"
hint.uart.2.flags="0x30"

And this in /etc/ttys
# IPMI console
# Note: The Java console viewer doesn't seem to be very smart as it doesn't
# properly support VT100
cuau2   "/usr/libexec/getty 3wire.115200"       vt100   on secure

I could then access it using ipmitool like so
ipmitool -H remoteip -U ADMIN -I lanplus sol activate
[login]
export TERM=xterm

Note that I wanted vidconsole by default because mostly the systems were used by people local to them, however we could break into the loader and type 'set console=comconsole,vidconsole’ and then get everything over the serial console for remote trouble shooting.

You may also wish to check the IPMI configuration via the web interface - by default it will failover to port 0 and it has terrible default passwords. I changed the passwords and forced it to use the dedicated IPMI port even if nothing was connected to it.

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
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