Remote Management; Almost out of the box.
When researching servers for our new data center one thing that I wanted to make sure to get support for is remote management. We won’t always have someone in front of the server. But we do always need access to the servers in the event of a problem.
What we found were servers from Aberdeen Inc., built from SuperMicro components and included an IPMI card installed. From what I understood this included full remote management support including power control and console support. There was even mention of CD/DVD redirection which sounded quite intriguing. Because of this I had planned on setting up these machines “remotely.” Even though I would be in the same room as the server I wanted to test out their ability to be managed remotely and most impressively installing the operating system from the IPMI solution.
I was quite surprised to find out when the servers arrived that there was no documentation on the IPMI support. In fact, the documentation from SuperMicro contains no more information than you can come up with yourself by reading the bios menus. It reminds me of the bad technical writers that Joel spoke of. In any case I thought I would try my luck. I had a two page document sent from Aberdeen that showed which ethernet port was IPMI enabled so I plugged it in. My hope was that it would get an IP from my DHCP server. When it didn’t I went looking through the bios for options.
Ok. So there is my problem. It has a Static IP set. Seems simple enough. I change that option to DHCP, save the settings and reboot. A good 3 minutes later (why does it take so long for those RAIDs to get going?) and I was back in business. No wait, still no IP address assigned. So the next thing I did was hit Google and start searching for any combination of IPMI documentation, setup, tutorial, anything. I found about 3 posts talking about the IPMI on these boards. Not quite a stellar turn-out for Google I would say. Most of the them referred to a CD that came with the card. I didn’t have a CD. But then again, most of the posts were talking about installing the card on the motherboard (which I didn’t do) and flashing the IPMI’s firmware (which I also didn’t do.) Both of these things must have happened at Aberdeen Inc. before I ever received the server. Wanting to find the resolution to this problem without a call to Aberdeen (it was about 12:30 AM at this point so I’m not even sure if they had any support right then) I kept on searching. What I found was very interesting. In a web hosting talk forum someone mentioned something that caught my eye.
the MAC address for supermicro’s IPMI20-E card must be the same one with LAN1 on PDSMI+ board which has Intel dual Gb NICs
The MAC address must match LAN1? Well, that’s a bit odd. I’m sure there is some good explanation for this. But then I also realized that if I’m going to do this then I most likely need to have the network plugged into LAN1 as well. Before I went ahead to make the MAC address change I decided to just plugin the ethernet to LAN1 and see if it gets assigned an IP address. 3 minutes later I knew my answer. Nope. But I still had one more thing to try. Changing that MAC address.
With my settings still at DHCP I changed the MAC address to match LAN1. Once I entered in the numbers and hit enter it took quite a while just sitting there unresponsive. I contemplated whether or not anything happened or even if I just hosed this brand new system. But it did start to respond again. Once it did I went to check if a new IP address had been assigned and I was surprised to see that it was. Opening a web browser pointing to that IP address I was greeted with a very web 1.0 looking login page with SuperMicro’s logo.
Step 1 is complete. I can now remotely access my machine, which is 3 feet away from me. It’s going to be a long weekend.
Throughout my research I also found a few links online with information, manuals, firmware’s etc
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