On Mon, 5 Mar 2007, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 12:15:04AM +0300, Artem Kuchin wrote:
The othe question, is there such technology for Supermicro mainboards?
Yes, Supermicro makes IPMI add-on cards (they require IPMI capability on
the mainboard, however).
Be warned about these cards, however. A friend of mine at Yahoo! has
encountered a major BIOS/IPMI oversight, where in the case that the IPMI
event log becomes full, the system BIOS upon boot will _require_ someone
hit F1 to continue on the console, until the IPMI history is cleared.
Ultimately this requires someone to go to the datacenter and manually
hit F1 on the console, clear the IPMI log, and let the machine boot up.
Wonderful oversight.
I might also add that we tried that on a few Supermicro boxes and found
the whole mess to be not as reliable as you'd like an OOB management tool
to be. The java client is spotty at best, really wants to be run in
Windows, and basically falls apart when doing simple console redirection
in the client. Never really saw it work well.
Now it seems more and more problems are coming to light with vendor IPMI
implementations (Broadcom's pseudo-iLO causes ARP storms because there
is no dedicated NIC for iLO and the NIC technically has two MAC
addresses, Supermicro's IPMI and the event log problem, yadda yadda.)
Yeah, I was a little disappointed in this - when I read about IPMI I
thought that it was something of a standard and that I'd be able to pick
and choose clients that run natively on FreeBSD or OS-X. That does not
seem to be the case at all.
Seems to me the only vendors who got this right were 1) HP/Compaq with
their true iLO/iLO2, and 2) Sun.
Which is a shame as the Supermicro cards were sub-$100...
Charles
--
| Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
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