Tuesday, December 10, 2013

IPMI for remote management

I've been recently playing around with IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) which was developed by Intel and implemented in Dell, HP, Supermicro and a variety of other Intel servers.

In my lab, I am using it to manage a Linux Server, and here is how I configured it.

1.- Loading IPMI kernel modules

I added ipmi_si and ipmi_devintf to my /etc/modules so those can load at startup, but also loaded those manually.
 root@donkey:~# modprobe ipmi_si  
 root@donkey:~# modprobe ipmi_devintf    

2.- Configuring IPMI network settings with ipmitool

 root@donkey:~# ipmitool lan set 1 ipsrc static  
 root@donkey:~# ipmitool lan set 1 ipaddr 192.168.0.201  
 Setting LAN IP Address to 192.168.0.201  
 root@donkey:~# ipmitool lan set 1 netmask 255.255.255.0  
 Setting LAN Subnet Mask to 255.255.255.0  
 root@donkey:~# ipmitool lan set 1 defgw ipaddr 192.168.0.1  
 Setting LAN Default Gateway IP to 192.168.0.1  
 root@donkey:~# ipmitool lan print  
 Set in Progress     : Set Complete  
 Auth Type Support    : NONE MD2 MD5 PASSWORD  
 Auth Type Enable    : Callback : MD2 MD5 PASSWORD  
             : User   : MD2 MD5 PASSWORD  
             : Operator : MD2 MD5 PASSWORD  
             : Admin  : MD2 MD5 PASSWORD  
             : OEM   : MD2 MD5 PASSWORD  
 IP Address Source    : Static Address  
 IP Address       : 192.168.0.201  
 Subnet Mask       : 255.255.255.0  
 MAC Address       : 00:25:90:XX:XX:XX  
 SNMP Community String  : public  
 IP Header        : TTL=0x00 Flags=0x00 Precedence=0x00 TOS=0x00  
 BMC ARP Control     : ARP Responses Enabled, Gratuitous ARP Disabled  
 Default Gateway IP   : 192.168.0.1  
 Default Gateway MAC   : 00:00:00:00:00:00  
 Backup Gateway IP    : 0.0.0.0  
 Backup Gateway MAC   : 00:00:00:00:00:00  
 802.1q VLAN ID     : Disabled  
 802.1q VLAN Priority  : 0  
 RMCP+ Cipher Suites   : 0,1,2,3,6,7,8,11,12  
 Cipher Suite Priv Max  : aaaaXXaaaXXaaXX  
             :   X=Cipher Suite Unused  
             :   c=CALLBACK  
             :   u=USER  
             :   o=OPERATOR  
             :   a=ADMIN  
             :   O=OEM  

3.- Configuring user credentials with ipmitool

Default admin user is 'ADMIN', here is how I set his password:
 root@donkey:~# ipmitool user list 1  
 ID Name       Callin Link Auth IPMI Msg  Channel Priv Limit  
 2  ADMIN      false  false   true    ADMINISTRATOR  
 root@donkey:~# ipmitool user set password 2 yourpassword  

4.- Accessing IPMI interface

We can now access the IPMI interface and log into the system by going to:

https://192.168.0.201 (this is the IP I assigned to the IPMI interface).

References

5 comments:

  1. Great concise overview! After a lot of searching, I was finally able to get my VirtualBox instance back online thanks to the information you've provided.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Agh! I meant this comment for your "Install VirtualBox on Ubuntu" overview.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have done everything correctly but when I try to access the IPMI interface from the browser (https://192.168.2.101) I get page not found, can you please help me ? Thank you

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Is that the IP address displayed when you run ipmitool lan print? Also check the mac address and see if the interface is up (ifconfig) and the cable is connected.

      Delete
    2. Thank you for your reply. I can connect via IPMIView, so IP, MAC address is all correct.

      Delete