serial over lan

[Don Holmgren]

On Sat, 22 Feb 2003, Donald Becker wrote:

<snip>
> I'm guessing that you are looking for stand-alone tools that you can
> download, and the extensive support that you will need to get your
> specific configuration working, all provided for free.  I don't think
> that you will find that today.
>
> > Does anyone know of available code to do the IMPI 1.5 communications
> > over TCP/IP?  OpenIPMI at SourceForge doesn't seem to address this (I
> > may be wrong, but it seems to only handle local access to the BMC via
> > the most commonly implemented internal mechanism, KCS).
>
> You will need
>   - both KCS and MCS kernel drivers,
>   - a program to initialize the IP address on the clients,
>   - a user-level library layer to send commands and
>   - stand-alone commands.
>
> It's been done...
>
> --
> Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
> Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
> 410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Scyld Beowulf cluster system
> Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993
>

Don -

Thanks much for the quick and detailed reply.

No, I'm definitely not looking for stand-alone supported tools - I wrote
the IPMI 0.9 code years ago that we use here to do remote resets over
the EMP, and also the code to read sensors, control the watchdog timer,
and readout the motherboard log files via the KCS.

I am just wondering whether anyone else has made a start on the IPMI
over LAN code yet - if so, I'm happy to lend a hand.  If not, I'm also
happy to start a project to write the user-level library layer and the
stand-alone commands.

I'm must be missing something, as I don't understand why KCS and MCS
kernel drivers are necessary - the external box which requests the reset
or power cycle over ethernet needs to send datagrams to the correct
ethernet port on the target matchine and use the communications protocol
specified in the IPMI 1.5 and related documents.  Clearly that external
box can run any OS, and the target system isn't involved at all except
for the BMC.  One should certainly reuse existing code to form the
encapsulated IPMI command - the code that's missing does the
encapsulation into UDP datagrams.  Of course, just like the EMP
implementation, there's more involved than just wrapping the command.

I already have an automated way of initializing the IP and MAC addresses
on the client BMC cards, via a PXE network boot into DOS which
subsequently runs the vendor-supplied utility.  Otherwise I would have
gone quite mad initializing the 180 nodes in our new cluster.  I can
make this available if it's of any interest.

Don Holmgren
djholm at fnal.gov