Hello, All of our PE1950s (on two different) sites have problems with SoL...
They have been set up for IPMI remote access and SoL using ipmitool. When SoL sessions are not active the BMC outputs junk characters from its serial connection (and thus into the OS-visible serial port UART) - this behaviour is always reproducible, and can be triggered by sending a few hundred bytes of characters from the OS to the BMC (e.g. OS boot messages etc.). Some relevant snippets from my notes on the issue: I am 99.9% sure that this is a firmware bug on the BMC, and not an OS or application software bug, since it also shows up prior to OS boot. "On Dell PowerEdge 1950s (BMC firmware version 2.37) - it has been observed on a number of different machines that: When IPMI SoL sessions are enabled, but NOT active, spurious characters are received by the serial UART from the BMC (on Linux device /dev/ttyS1). The problem also exists outside of Linux - these spurious characters have (on several occasions) interrupted the boot process - by sending character sequences which interrupt the normal automatic boot process of the BIOS and/or boot loader - as such IPMI SoL must be disabled on these systems for reliable operation - this leaves the systems in-question without a viable remote-access system for BIOS/boot/OS interventions etc." BMC settings are as follows: arundel:~# ipmitool sol info 1 Set in progress : set-complete Enabled : true Force Encryption : true Force Authentication : false Privilege Level : ADMINISTRATOR Character Accumulate Level (ms) : 50 Character Send Threshold : 220 Retry Count : 7 Retry Interval (ms) : 1000 Volatile Bit Rate (kbps) : 57.6 Non-Volatile Bit Rate (kbps) : 57.6 Payload Channel : 1 (0x01) Payload Port : 623 All baud rates are set to 57.6k / 8bit / no parity in Linux (Linux kernel and 'getty' processes). BTW, I administer Intel and Tyan IPMI v2.0 machines using identical software and the same IPMI SoL settings - without seeing these problems. I can arrange to supply a hex-dump of the received "junk" characters if that's useful. I'm also happy to execute arbitrary IPMI commands etc. etc. Thanks, Tim. -- South East Open Source Solutions Limited Registered in England and Wales with company number 06134732. Registered Office: 2 Powell Gardens, Redhill, Surrey, RH1 1TQ VAT number: 900 6633 53 http://seoss.co.uk/ +44-(0)1273-808309 _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
