OpenBSD has a brand new IPMI implementation. The ipmi term Intelligent Platform Management refers to autonomous monitoring and recovery features implemented directly in platform management hardware and firmware. The key characteristics of Intelligent Platform Management is that inventory, monitoring, logging, and recovery control functions are available independent of the main processor, BIOS, and operating system.
IPMI Introduced on OpenBSD
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Very, very cool. I know a lot of Dell server hardware supports this (even the older low-end stuff, I think – but I might be of my rocker).
Together with the new ses (scsi enclosures) and safte (scsi accessed fault-tolerant enclosure) support, and the existing watchdog timer and hardware sensors support, this makes hardware monitoring simply bliss.
Since IPMI is designed by Intel/HP/Nec/Dell, I guess this is limited to i386 architectures?
No, IPMI is used in telecom where PPCs are popular also (smaller power consumption).
[root@linuxbox ~]# ipmitool sel list
1 | 10/20/2005 | 11:59:25 | Event Logging Disabled #0x51 | Log area reset/cleared
2 | 10/20/2005 | 12:01:57 | Power Supply #0x43 | Failure detected
3 | 10/20/2005 | 12:01:57 | Power Supply #0x43 | Predictive failure
4 | 10/20/2005 | 12:01:57 | Power Supply #0x43 | Power Supply AC lost
5 | 10/20/2005 | 12:01:57 | Power Supply #0x53 | Fully Redundant
From a Dell Poweredge 2850. Linux has had IPMI support for some time now
I have a Dell PowerEdge 2550 with IPMI as well. But you fail to mention what a PITA it is to install it from Dell’s packaging. This is what I love about OpenBSD… they give us great tools, in the default OS, that are simple to use.
Written and open sourced, like a number of things before it, by engineers at Sun. OpenBSD did their own thing, and that’s cool, but Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, and (yes) even Windows get ipmitool from code that originated at Sun.
PITA to install? OpenIPMI comes by default in RHEL at least, hardware support is in the kernel.
Must be in RHEL 4, certainly wasn’t in my RHEL 3. Lucky you.
Did IPMI even exist when RHEL3 was released?