On 23/03/2011 15:36, Roderick A. Anderson wrote:
> It has been awhile since I _really_ looked at the boxes but I seem to
> remember a third RJ45 plug and there are only two NICs. So I should be
> good to go.
>
> This will be received warmly as we have Nagios running on a system but
> currently only monitor some of the guests.
Sounds like what you need. Note that sadly the IPMI on most systems
seem extremely buggy and works less well than advertised, but it's still
a superb resource (eg mine is supposed to be able to share an onboard
NIC, but that often stops working after a couple of weeks, so I reverted
to using the extra switch port). Also note that there are usually some
easy to guess manufacturer passwords setup, so be sure to change those
in the web interface before changing the IP to be visible to evil-doers
(internet)
Roughly speaking you have a small embedded computer running which can
power on/off, read the sensors, supply VGA/serial feeds and often more.
It generally consumes a few watts so beware that even (IPMI) computers
which are off, now consume a reasonable chunk of power (due to the IPMI
board running)
I mostly use ipmitool and it needs quite some long incantations,
however, I have a few scripts which log me into the serial console or
hard reboot the machines - roughly this is all I need. The serial
console shows me the whole boot process including bios screens
As you say, a few ipmitool incantations allow you to get the machine
sensors, so you could also feed these to Nagios if for some reason you
couldn't talk to the host OS?
Anyway, once you start using it I think it's hard to buy a machine which
doesn't have a strong working IPMI implementation!
Good luck
Ed W
Received on Thu Mar 24 08:19:28 2011