[Beowulf] non-proprietary IPMI card?

[David Mathog]

> Mark Hahn wrote:
> >>> has anyone ever seen a PCI add-in card that offered IPMI-like
functions?
> >>
> >> Such a card would need to be powered from the PCI/PCI-E bus even when
> >> the power is (soft-)off. I'm not sure that the bus offers the amount
> >> of power needed for the functionality.
> > 
> > how do wake-on-lan cards manage, then?
> 
> 5 volt atx phantom power...

Also various magic settings in the BIOS and at run time.  It's not only
possible but common for a wake-on-lan card to refuse to WOL because
the card/CPU isn't in the right state.  Often "the right state"
cannot be guaranteed following the initial application of power no
matter what settings are used in the BIOS.  For instance, the PCs
in our classroom are not set to power up when power is restored (they
aren't compute nodes so no reason to set them up this way.)  This
is important because under both linux and windows some of
the bits that enable WOL in the NIC are set by the OS during
the boot sequence, not by the BIOS. So, unfortunately,
following a power failure these machines will not respond to a WOL,
even though they would have before the power failure.  These are
Asus A8N5X mobos with nForce 4 chipsets.  I suspect most if not all
other nForce 4 mobos would behave the same.

Regards,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech