Comments on: Configuring and Securing IPMI on Dell PowerEdge x8xx Hardware

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:53:54 +0000

Thanks! Works perfect! (even on IBM x3550)

By: Ronan

Ronan — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 08:26:19 +0000

The server draws its power from the mains (obviously). As long as the mains cord is connected the BMC will be active.

If the shutdown process on your server “physically” downs the ethernet interface then the interface is no longer visible to the rest of the network (check your switch, you’ll see the port down). You need to ensure that your shutdown process doesn’t do an “ifconfig eth0 down” (or similar). Many (Linux) distributions now have hooks for this in their rc scripts or the relevant config files.

By: Fran

Fran — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:19:03 +0000

Last night I was using ipmi on our cluster of PowerEdge SC1425’s (stripped down 1850’s, but they still have the BMC). Once the power was off, ipmitool could not talk to the BMC. Once I powered the cluster back up, ipmitool worked fine. Ever see it where the BMC was not reachable in the power-off state?

By: ".forward file is group writable..." by Bob Plankers, The Lone Sysadmin

".forward file is group writable..." by Bob Plankers, The Lone Sysadmin — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 18:20:47 +0000

[...] about my IPMI how-to: I’m glad you found it useful. Sorry it hasn’t been updated recently, I have just [...]

By: jeff

jeff — Wed, 23 May 2007 23:02:20 +0000

This is great info and appreciate you sharing w/ the computing community at large. I have 35 boxes to get this running on and all of them are different models. Your tutorial (or exercise in frustration) will prove useful in getting to the end result much more efficiently. Thank you. :)

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 08:36:21 +0000

I’m glad I found this post, I am still having lots of trouble with Remote access to the BMC on a Poweredge 830. Should I be able to ping the BMC IP address from another machine? I cannot. My arp table does show the correct IP to MAC association and that the address is reachable. All remote ipmitool commands fail.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

By: Anders

Anders — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 21:46:41 +0000

I would add that because the BMC has it’s own TCP stack, it makes good sense to use a different fakenet IP on the same subnet. For obvious reasons the local system still won’t be able to ping that IP but of course remote machines will.

Thanks for getting this together. I was able to get things running quickly. The world needs more “I’m not a raving moron” guides just like this.

By: Stephan

Stephan — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 15:41:21 +0000

Thanks for ur hints. Now IPMI is working well. but did u figure out how to read things via snmp?
would ease some processes..

Greets

By: Benoit

Benoit — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 10:31:49 +0000

For the vlan (802.1q) question i would guess that it must be set using the following command (Dell 1950, openipmi 2.0.2):
ipmitool lan set 1 vlan id

(Be carefull while testing i wasn’t able to switch off
the functionnality).

By: Shane

Shane — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 11:39:40 +0000

For some reason, the graceful shutdown feature works perfectly on RHEL servers (using IPMI), but on my Windows 2003 servers, it does not. Is there some W2K3 config I need to make to allow BMC shutdown?

By: Stuart Low

Stuart Low — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 05:23:19 +0000

Thanks for that. Interestingly on my fairly stock RHEL4 installation trying to hit the IP assigned to BMC from the machine itself doesn’t work yet remotely it does.