Archive for November 8th, 2006

IPMI Serial over Lan (SoL) on a Dell PowerEdge

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers are quite nice to play with. But they have a nice feature that most people don’t seem to use – the built-in “Base Management Controller” (BMC).
Basically it’s a built-in management card that can be controlled locally on the server, via the serial console or remotely over LAN. Besides reading various system information such as temperatures, fan-speeds, eventlogs etc. it supports power switching functions (on/off/reset..) and a really nice thing, Serial over Lan (SoL).
Using this feature you can redirect serial output over the network. If you run some sort of unix on the server that means that you can control everything remotely, including the BIOS screens, RAID setup screens, the bootloader and your console – even if you mess up the OS’s network configuration. When running some other operating system the fun most likely stops after the RAID setup screens 😉

(more…)

Posted in Technology | Comments Off