[Beowulf] Intel motherboard BMC

[Tony Brian Albers]

Does the BMC itself know its own hostname?

/tony

On 21/06/18 11:13, Jörg Saßmannshausen wrote:
> 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
> 
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-- 
Tony Albers
Systems administrator, IT-development
Royal Danish Library, Victor Albecks Vej 1, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
Tel: +45 2566 2383 / +45 8946 2316