Gavin Carr IPMI on CentOS/RHEL Thu 11 Mar 2010 Tags: centos, dell, ipmi, linux, rhel.

Spent a few days deep in the bowels of a couple of datacentres last week, and re alised I didn't know enough about Dell's DRAC base management controllers to use them properly. In particular, I didn't know how to mess with the drac settings from within the OS. So spent some of today researching that. Turns out there are a couple of routes to do this. You can use the Dell native t ools (e.g. racadm) included in Dell's OMSA product, or you can use vendor-neutra l IPMI, which is well-supported by Dell DRACs. I went with the latter as it's mo re cross-platform, and the tools come native with CentOS, instead of having to s etup Dell's OMSA repositories. The Dell-native tools may give you more functiona lity, but for what I wanted to do IPMI seems to work just fine. So installation is just: yum install OpenIPMI OpenIPMI-tools chkconfig ipmi on service ipmi start and then from the local machine you can use ipmitool to access and manipulate al l kinds of useful stuff: # IPMI commands ipmitool help man ipmitool # To check firmware version ipmitool mc info # To reset the management controller ipmitool mc reset [ warm | cold ] # Show field-replaceable-unit details ipmitool fru print # Show sensor output ipmitool sdr list ipmitool sdr type list ipmitool sdr type Temperature ipmitool sdr type Fan ipmitool sdr type 'Power Supply' # Chassis commands ipmitool chassis status ipmitool chassis identify [<interval>] efault 15s) ipmitool [chassis] power soft ipmitool [chassis] power cycle r on ipmitool [chassis] power off ipmitool [chassis] power on ipmitool [chassis] power reset # Modify boot device for next reboot ipmitool chassis bootdev pxe

# turn on front panel identify light (d # initiate a soft-shutdown via acpi # issue a hard power off, wait 1s, powe # issue a hard power off # issue a hard power on # issue a hard reset

ipmitool chassis bootdev cdrom ipmitool chassis bootdev bios # Logging ipmitool sel ipmitool sel ipmitool sel ipmitool sel info list elist clear

# extended list (see manpage)

For remote access, you need to setup user and network settings, either at boot t ime on the DRAC card itself, or from the OS via ipmitool: # Display/reset password for default root user (userid '2') ipmitool user list 1 ipmitool user set password 2 <new_password> # Display/configure lan settings ipmitool lan print 1 ipmitool lan set 1 ipsrc [ static | dhcp ] ipmitool lan set 1 ipaddr 192.168.1.101 ipmitool lan set 1 netmask 255.255.255.0 ipmitool lan set 1 defgw ipaddr 192.168.1.254 Once this is configured you should be able to connect using the 'lan' interface to ipmitool, like this: ipmitool -I lan -U root -H 192.168.1.101 chassis status which will prompt you for your ipmi root password, or you can do the following: echo <new_password> > ~/.racpasswd chmod 600 ~/.racpasswd and then use that password file instead of manually entering it each time: ipmitool -I lan -U root -f ~/.racpasswd -H 192.168.1.101 chassis status I'm using an 'ipmi' alias that looks like this: alias ipmi='ipmitool -I lan -U root -f ~/.racpasswd -H' # which then allows you to do the much shorter: ipmi 192.168.1.101 chassis status # OR ipmi <hostname> chassis status Finally, if you configure serial console redirection in the bios as follows: Serial Communication -> Serial Communication: On with Console Redirection via COM2 Serial Communication -> External Serial Connector: COM2 Serial Communication -> Redirection After Boot: Disabled then you can setup standard serial access in grub.conf and inittab on com2/ttyS1 and get serial console access via IPMI serial-over-lan using the 'lanplus' inte rface: ipmitool -I lanplus -U root -f ~/.racpasswd -H 192.168.1.101 sol activate which I typically use via a shell function:

# ipmi serial-over-lan function isol() { if [ -n "$1" ]; then ipmitool -I lanplus -U root -f ~/.racpasswd -H $1 sol activate else echo "usage: sol <sol_ip>" fi } # used like: isol 192.168.1.101 isol <hostname>

INFOOOOO:::

List of IPMI terms. Taken wholesale from http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~dranch/LI NUX/IPMI/ipmi-on-linux.html BMC : Baseboard Management Controllers. IPMI compliant micro controllers tha t handle system event management. These are usually available as cPCI cards. GPCagent : A SuperMicro proprietary Graceful Power control agent. This agent provi des graceful power control features for both Linux and windows platform. GPC mea ns the OS will shutdown gracefully before a power shutdown. It is available from the SuperMicro website. It run as a daemon (smagent) on a Linux based managed s ystem. It requires openIPMI kernel modules to be installed on the managed system to interact with the IPMI device. i2c : A low speed (>=400khz) system management interface supported on most e mbedded systems. It is similar to the SMBus. ipmicli : A SuperMicro proprietary command line interface for Linux, similar in function to IPMIView, available from the SuperMicro website. IPMItool : An opensource tool for accessing the IPMI device through either l ocal or remote access. Its a command line tool that can used to perform various commands for reading and writing to the IPMI device. It is equivalent to the ipm icli proprietary tool except for console redirection which is not available on t his tool. IPMIView : A SuperMicro proprietary java applet available from SuperMicro we bsite. Runs on both windows (tested on windows2k) and Linux (fc3) platforms. Thi s runs on the remote system and can be used to interact with the IPMI interface on the managed system. This software provides sensor monitoring, secure login, L AN/IP configuration, chassis power control and console redirection terminal. It also provides a graceful power shutdown/restart option that requires a daemon ru nning on the managed system. ipnmac : A SuperMicro proprietary command line tool for Linux to set the IP and mac address for the ipmi interface. This tool can be used to set the address locally on the managed system. Managed system : system which is to be managed using IPMI. The IPMI card is installed on this machine. IPMI v2.0 supports both local and remote access to th

e BMC. Local access is provided through a system interface like kCS (IO port). R emote access is provided through the onboard LAN interface (on IPMI supported mo therboards). OpenIPMI : An opensource IPMI project that maintains linux drivers for the I PMI device. These drivers run on the managed system and provide a local interfac e to the IPMI card. They also support a primitive command line utility, equivale nt to the ipmicli. The utility is meant more as a sample than a working tool. Remote system : System from which the IPMI enabled server is managed. This i s usually over the network. SMbus : System Management bus. A low speed (<100khz) system management inter face supported on most PC and server motherboards. It is similar to the I2C bus. The BMC uses the SMbus to communicate with motherboard sensors and Ethernet int erface. SuperoDoctor : A SuperMicro proprietary IPMI tool. Verision II is a command line tool for local access on the managed system to IPMI interface. Version III is a GUI based tool for local access but works only on windows platform. This re quires the openIPMI kernel modules to be installed on the managed machine.