[Beowulf] Intel motherboard BMC

[Jörg Saßmannshausen]

Dear all,

I got a bit of a confusing situation with the BMC of some Intel motherboards 
which we recently purchased and I am not quite sure what to make out of it. 

We have install a generic user via the IPMI commands on the compute nodes and 
I can access the BMC remotely, again via the IPMI command like this:

$ ipmitool -H node105-bmc -U username -P xxx power status

This is working, Also, this works:

$ ipmitool -H 10.0.1.105 -U username -P xxx power status

A nslookup of node105-bmc gives the right IP address as well. 

However, if I want to use the GUI for the BMC, i.e. opening my browser and 
put:

https://node105-bmc

in the URL, I get the loging page When I enter my login credentials then, 
which are the same as above, I have a problem to log in *IF* I am using the 
hostname as address but not *IF* I am using the IP address. Just to add to the 
confusion more, on one node the hostname was working. 
With problems I mean the browser tells me my login credentials are wrong which 
does not happen when I am using the IP address. 
Also, I can only use https and not http and for now I got the generic self 
signed certificates. I want to change them at one point but right now that is 
more on the bottom of my to-do list.

I find that really odd and I am not quite sure what is going on here. With all 
the Supermicro kit I once had I never had these issues before. I was able to 
log in regardless of using the hostname or IP address. 
So clearly Intel does something here Supermicro did not (at the time).

The boards in question are Intel S2600BPB ones. 

Has anybody seen this before? 

I got a second issue with these boards. I usually do the normal PXE/NFS boot 
and the setup is working well for the other, older Supermicro machines. 
However, with the new Intel ones, this is crashing. 
The procedure is you are selecting in the boot-menu you want to do a PXE boot 
and not boot from the local hard drive. 
It then boots the initramfs which seems to be fine. From what I can see, both 
during the boot process and from the log files of the DHCP-server, it is 
getting the right IP address. 
However, when the initramfs hands over to the kernel, it crashes with:
kernel panic! attempt to kill init
and you literally have to pull the plug on the machine, i.e. a hard reset.

The only time I have seen that was when I did not specify the NIC and when I 
had two NICs, it somehow decided to use the other one. I fixed that problem by 
defining the interface in the boot-arguments and also the second NIC is not 
connected anyway. It also has a InfiniBand card which does allow booting from 
it. Again, it is not connected so in theory it should not matter. 

I am stuck here. I am using a 4.x kernel for the PXE boot, so a fairly recent 
one. As I said, it works for the older machines but not for the newer ones. 

 I upgraded the whole PXE/NFS boot and that is not working too.

Does anybody have any ideas here?

Sorry for asking 2 questions in one email but as they are related I hope that 
is ok.

All the best from a sunny London

Jörg