IPMI love for our main UK lab
In an unusual spate of activity and compassion I’ve spent the last two days configuring IPMI on all of the compatible hosts in our main lab. In every Sun support lab we have a lot of hosts, any of which an engineer may book for his escalation.
The job of the labstaff is to sort out any physical hardware requirements they have… e.g. install a fibre channel host bus adapter, hook up some FC array goodness, etc. In addition to this we support them on these machines… this means that if it breaks, we fix it.
A side effect of this is that if somebody comes along and types “init 5” (aka shutdown and power off), it is us that get called to the rescue.
IPMI is awesome… the first machines Sun shipped with IPMI support (that I know of) were the Cobalt lx50s. Unfortunately the lx50, v60x and v65x machines require a reboot with the most bizarrely non-standards compliant CD going to get the IPMI going. This means that I wasn’t able to sit at my desk and do it all remotely… I had to actually go down to the lab (!) and put CDs into the drives!
But the work paid off, once I was done we could use the excellent “rpower” utility written by Keith Harvey to query and control the power status of the hosts.
So impressed I decided to take it further and configure IPMI and rpower for all of the other compatible hosts in our lab… this includes the v20z, v40z, X2100, X2200, X4100, X4200, X4500, X4600 machines.
As Keith, kami of the rpowerness, will have us know: it’s all about consistency. And now that rpower works for almost every host in the lab, we are getting close to living the dream.
Tags: Work