Boot prompt for Intel AMT

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 12:15:04AM +0300, Artem Kuchin wrote:
> The othe question, is there such technology for Supermicro mainboards?

Yes, Supermicro makes IPMI add-on cards (they require IPMI capability on
the mainboard, however).

Be warned about these cards, however.  A friend of mine at Yahoo!  has
encountered a major BIOS/IPMI oversight, where in the case that the IPMI
event log becomes full, the system BIOS upon boot will _require_ someone
hit F1 to continue on the console, until the IPMI history is cleared.
Ultimately this requires someone to go to the datacenter and manually
hit F1 on the console, clear the IPMI log, and let the machine boot up.
Wonderful oversight.

Yes, there are IPMI management utilities for some OSes, but many of them
are closed-source, only work on certain versions of the OS, or for the
open-source ones do not let you control/monitor as much as you would
under the native utility from the vendor.

Now it seems more and more problems are coming to light with vendor IPMI
implementations (Broadcom's pseudo-iLO causes ARP storms because there
is no dedicated NIC for iLO and the NIC technically has two MAC
addresses, Supermicro's IPMI and the event log problem, yadda yadda.)

Seems to me the only vendors who got this right were 1) HP/Compaq with
their true iLO/iLO2, and 2) Sun.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                 jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                        http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                   Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.               PGP: 4BD6C0CB |