[Beowulf] Re: recommendation on crash cart for a cluster room:fullcluster KVM is not an option I suppose?

[Greg Lindahl]

On Thu, Oct 08, 2009 at 05:08:54PM -0500, Rahul Nabar wrote:

> So, hopefully I will have very little need for IPMI (remote power
> cycling is great though; those network aware power distribution stics
> seem great).

You haven't mentioned the other things you can use IPMI for.

1) Console logging. Your machine just crashed. No clue in
/var/log/messages. "I wonder if it printed something on the console?"
Answer: ipmi and conman (available in an rpm in Red Hat distros).

2) Monitoring. Temp, fan speeds, power supply state, events. Answers
the "why is the little red light on the front of the case lit?"
question. You can get some of this via other software (lm_sensors),
but I find ipmitool to suck less, and ipmitool accurately answers the
red light question -- lm_sensors can only guess.

-- g