Garbage on SOL console (PE1950/lenny)

[David Sparks]

> The solution is to disable the IPMI-over-serial-port support on the BMC
> (the problem is that the login prompt from Linux - or any other output
> to the serial port - is interpreted as IPMI commands, for which an error
> is generated, which generates more output from Linux, ad infinitum).
> You can disable this using the Dell syscfg tool which is I think part of
> the Dell DTK (you don't need to install OMSA, although it might be
> included in that as well) and possibly with ipmitool (although I'm not
> entirely sure about that, and don't know the specific command), but
> often the most convenient way to deal with this, especially with
> hardware fresh from Dell, is to use the BMC configuration in the BIOS
> setup (Ctrl-E) and select reset to defaults (for whatever reason, Dell
> ships with settings different than the defaults, at least for
> IPMI-over-serial).

Does anyone know how to do this with plain IPMI (preferably ipmitool)?

Excellent analysis btw.

ds




> The specific syscfg command to use is:
> 
> syscfg serialchannelaccess --ipmioverserial=disable
> 
> Once you do this, you should no longer see garbage on your serial ports
> (is it really garbage? i.e. NUL and other weird ASCII that might
> indicate a serial speed mismatch, which in theory should not be possible
> - or is the garbage just odd ASCII error messages that are invalid
> logins? which is what I was seeing if I disabled getty and did a cat
> /dev/ttyS1).
> 
> @alex