IPMI on the Poweredge 850

[Nicholas Avenell]

Nicholas Avenell wrote:
> We have managed to get IPMI working to some extent on the 850s (And
> totally on the 1850s, which is good).
We've got about as far as we're going to get on these, and I'm going to
try to pull all the hoops we jumped though into an article.

Basically, when we reset the 850s to factory settings and stopped
fiddling, the IPMI worked perfectly, but after a few reboots of the
machine completely stopped responding, either to network or local
ipmitool access. The only way to get them back after that was a hard
reset (shut down, deny all power, reboot) at this point we were fine for
another few reboots. This appears to be true for all the 850s we have.

Getting local access, we did this:

add to kernel boot line:   pnpacpi=off
add to modprobe's options file:    options ipmi_si type="kcs"
ports="0xca8" regspacings="4"
modprobe ipmi_si
modprobe ipmi_devintf

(I wouldn't add them to the automatically loaded modules, as when the
card isn't responding modprobe ipmi_si sits there refusing to quit)

at this point "ipmitool -I open chassis identify 5" should make the blue
light flash.

Useful links:
    IPMI on Debian:
http://buttersideup.com/docs/howto/IPMI_on_Debian.html (On the 850s &
1850s, the LAN is channel 1)
    Dell's IPMI Page: http://linux.dell.com/ipmi.shtml (Obviously)
   
http://lonesysadmin.net/2005/09/23/configuring-and-securing-ipmi-on-dell-poweredge-x8xx-hardware/

-- 
Nicholas Avenell
Technical Developer (Special Projects)
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