IPMI

IPMI

The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) specification defines a set of common interfaces to a computer system which system administrators can use to monitor system health and manage the system. Several dozen companies support IPMI. Dell, HP, Intel Corporation and NEC Corporation announced IPMI v1.0 on 1998-09-16, v1.5 on 2001-03-01, and v2.0 on 2004-02-14.

IPMI operates independently of the operating system (OS) and allows administrators to manage a system remotely even in the absence of the OS or the system management software, or even if the monitored system is not powered on. IPMI can also function when the OS has started, and offers enhanced features when used with the system management software. IPMI gives only the structure and format of the interfaces as a standard; implementation may vary.

For details, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Platform_Management_Interface

Installing

Before you can use IPMI on a FreeBSD server, you will need to load the impi kernel module (or compile it in the kernel).

kldload ipmi
kldstat

OR

vi /boot/loader.conf
ipmi_load="YES"

shutdown -r now

Next you will need to install client to talk to ipmi and get information about your server.

cd /usr/ports/sysutils/ipmitool
make install clean

If your server hardware has a BMC (board management controller), then the following commands should work for you:

ipmitool -I open chassis status
ipmitool -I open sel list
ipmitool -I open sdr type temperature
ipmitool -I open fru print

Supported Hardware

Dell: http://linux.dell.com/ipmi.shtml

On Dell 1750 systems, support for IMPI 1.0 is available using the ERA/O card. But after testing on Freebsd 7.0 STABLE, the BIOS doesn't seems to send information about the IPMI BMC. So it must be added manually via:

vi /boot/device.hints
hint.ipmi.0.at=isa0
hint.ipmi.0.mode=KCS