Rahul, Yes, that is a key function that all IPMI BMCs are supposed to provide. The BMC is generally not affected by what the OS does, unless there are IPMI-aware applications running in the OS, specifically talking to the BMC. There are a few possible explanations for this behavior:
1) IPMI LAN configuration. Make sure that the IPMI LAN was properly configured. It sounds like you may have tested this beforehand. Even something like the ARP configuration could cause the port to no longer be visible to the router. 2) Basic BMC LAN functionality. The verbose output doesn't show ipmitool sending an RMCP ping, which it should attempt, unless you specified OEM Supermicro. Some other tools have specific method to invoke the RMCP ping, if you wish. Ipmiutil has 'ipmiutil discover' and freeipmi has 'rmcpping'. Or, if it is a dedicated BMC NIC, it may even answer normal pings. This would determine if the BMC is responding to the LAN port at all or not. Most likely it is not, since the BMC did not respond to the GetChannelAuthCap command in the output below. 3) Some OS-resident (custom?) IPMI-aware application that may be causing trouble/stress/configuration problems with the BMC. In a healthy system, the 'ps -ef' output on the target should show any ipmi-related processes that are running. The most common problem I've seen is sometimes these apps may use SetSelTime frequently to change the BMC's timestamp. This can cause serious confusion for the BMC, since this is not intended to be used more than once per boot, or daily (similar to NTP usage), and especially if the BMC's timestamp gets set backward when something else is in process. 4) A bug in the BMC. You didn't mention which vendor's IPMI BMC is being used, but from the To list, it might be Dell (?). Get the BMC version number and find out if there is an upgrade from the vendor. That is more important than what ipmitool does. If the BMC is in a bad state, the history from the IPMI SEL may be helpful to the vendor. If it is reproducible after an upgrade, the vendor should be able to fix it. Andy -----Original Message----- From: Rahul Nabar [mailto:rpna...@gmail.com] Sent: Sunday, August 29, 2010 5:17 PM To: linux-powere...@dell.com; ipmitool-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Ipmitool-devel] Is the BMC robust to recover from system hangs?impitool unresponsive I typically use out-of-band ipmitool to reboot machines that might once in a while be unreachable via ssh remotely because something went wrong. Earlier today I was running a new, challenging parallel job over 32 servers and something went wrong. I suspect the nodes ran out of memory and after that a bunch of nodes became unresponsive. On some I was able to use impitool to reboot: /usr/bin/ipmitool -f ~/ipmi_pw -I lanplus -U root -H 172.16.0.13 power cycle But a bunch of them the BMC just doesn't respond to ipmitool? /usr/bin/ipmitool -f ~/ipmi_pw -I lanplus -U root -H 172.16.0.13 power status just hangs. Isn't this the whole point behind the BMC the ability to be able to connect and recover out-of-band? Even if (worst case) my kernel panicked and the tcp stack collapsed shouldn't ipmi still be able to talk to the BMC? I had checked that before the job crashed the nodes the BMCs were working and responsive to IPMI. Am I doing something wrong here or is this non-robustness a documented shortcoming of the BMC's? Any comments for others using BMC's / IPMI are very welcome! Verbose: no clues More verbose: IPMI LAN host 172.16.0.14 port 623 >> Sending IPMI command payload >> netfn : 0x06 >> command : 0x38 >> data : 0x8e 0x04 >> Sending IPMI command payload >> netfn : 0x06 >> command : 0x38 >> data : 0x8e 0x04 Most verbose: IPMI LAN host 172.16.0.14 port 623 >> Sending IPMI command payload >> netfn : 0x06 >> command : 0x38 >> data : 0x8e 0x04 BUILDING A v1.5 COMMAND >> IPMI Request Session Header >> Authtype : NONE >> Sequence : 0x00000000 >> Session ID : 0x00000000 >> IPMI Request Message Header >> Rs Addr : 20 >> NetFn : 06 >> Rs LUN : 0 >> Rq Addr : 81 >> Rq Seq : 00 >> Rq Lun : 0 >> Command : 38 Are there any more options I can pass to ipmitool to increase verbosity and know at what exact point the hang is occuring? -- Rahul ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------ Sell apps to millions through the Intel(R) Atom(Tm) Developer Program Be part of this innovative community and reach millions of netbook users worldwide. Take advantage of special opportunities to increase revenue and speed time-to-market. Join now, and jumpstart your future. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-atom-d2d _______________________________________________ Ipmitool-devel mailing list Ipmitool-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ipmitool-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sell apps to millions through the Intel(R) Atom(Tm) Developer Program Be part of this innovative community and reach millions of netbook users worldwide. Take advantage of special opportunities to increase revenue and speed time-to-market. Join now, and jumpstart your future. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-atom-d2d _______________________________________________ Ipmitool-devel mailing list Ipmitool-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ipmitool-devel
