Re: Problems with IPMI and wm? sharing a physical Ethernet port

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 06:20:22PM +0200, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> 
> I've got a similar experience from supermicro. On a serie of servers
> I got, I coudln't get serial over ipmi to work. I tried to talk to them
> (and the reseller did too), but I couldn't convince them that a working
> serial port is important (their reply invariably was "use the GUI, it's
> better").
> 
> Recently I got amd opteron buldozer servers from them (A H8QG6 motherboard),
> and on this one the IPMI serial is working. So maybe some cares about
> this feature at supermicro anyway ...

It's the "9" series of Intel servers that have the broken IPMI serial.
The "8" ones are supposedly OK.

Evidently the problem is that the whole BMC/IPMI stack, as well as the
BMC dedicated ethernet and the physical VGA, are implemented by that one
chip on the motherboard, and either *it* doesn't implement the register
level serial interface, or the ATEN firmware for it that SuperMicro uses
does not implement that interface.  Couldn't get them to tell me which,
of course.

One way to tell that you might be dealing with this chip is if the
system manual shows no way to choose _which_ Ethernet is dedicated to
IPMI.  Are your Bulldozer systems the ones that have several Ethernets
any of which _can_ be effectively dedicated to IPMI, but none of which
is necessarily so?

Thor