IPMI and the Dell PowerEdge – Part the Third

Okay now that we have a user that’s set up for access to IPMI what can we find out about our server from a monitoring perspective?

If run ipmitool -h we get a list of commands we can run.

Several of these “commands” have sub commands. For example the ‘chassis’ command

Has sub-commands of: status, power, identify, policy, restart_cause, poh, bootdev, selftest.

So let’s get started by running ipmitool again. Ipmitool -h

ctronco@orw-ctronco-vm-01:~$ ipmitool -h

ipmitool version 1.8.7

usage: ipmitool [options...] <command>
-h This help
-V Show version information
-v Verbose (can use multiple times)
-c Display output in comma separated format
-I intf Interface to use
-H hostname Remote host name for LAN interface
-p port Remote RMCP port [default=623]
-U username Remote session username
-f file Read remote session password from file
-S sdr Use local file for remote SDR cache
-a Prompt for remote password
-e char Set SOL escape character
-C ciphersuite Cipher suite to be used by lanplus interface
-k key Use Kg key for IPMIv2 authentication
-L level Remote session privilege level [default=ADMINISTRATOR]
-A authtype Force use of auth type NONE, PASSWORD, MD2, MD5 or OEM
-P password Remote session password
-E Read password from IPMI_PASSWORD environment variable
-m address Set local IPMB address
-b channel Set destination channel for bridged request
-l lun Set destination lun for raw commands
-t address Bridge request to remote target address
-o oemtype Setup for OEM (use ‘list’ to see available OEM types)
-O seloem Use file for OEM SEL event descriptions

Interfaces:

open Linux OpenIPMI Interface [default]
imb Intel IMB Interface
lan IPMI v1.5 LAN Interface
lanplus IPMI v2.0 RMCP+ LAN Interface
 

Commands: <we’ve already seen these>

So we’ll need at least a host, a user, a password, and a command (let’s pick the fru command for fun). Using the user ipmi with a password of ‘password’ let’s see what happens:

ctronco@orw-ctronco-vm-01:~$ ipmitool -H 147.34.14.5 -U ipmi -P password fru

FRU Device Description : Builtin FRU Device (ID 0)

Activate Session error: Requested privilege level exceeds limit
Error: Unable to establish LAN session
ipmi_lan_send_cmd failed to open intf
Device not present (No Response)
ipmi_lan_send_cmd failed to open intf
Get Device ID command failed
 

ctronco@orw-ctronco-vm-01:~$

Okay looks like we have a couple of issues. The first is the “Requested privilege level exceeds limit” error. As I mentioned in the earlier post ipmitool by default want to connect with Administrator privileges. So we can override this by using the -L option. So our modified command line to deal with this would be:

ipmitool -H 147.34.14.5 -U ipmi -P password -L USER fru

But we also have another error: Unable to establish LAN session. In the earlier post I mentioned that we weren’t using the Encryption key because of difficulties in entering it on the command line for ipmitool. So we need to use the -I (that’s uppercase i) option to specify the ‘lan’ interface type (IPMI v1.5 LAN Interface). So our new command line incorporating this is:

ipmitool -H 147.34.14.5 -U ipmi -P password -L USER -I lan fru

Running this in our Linux term:

ctronco@orw-ctronco-vm-01:~$ ipmitool -H 147.34.14.5 -U ipmi -P password -L USER -I lan fru

FRU Device Description : Builtin FRU Device (ID 0)
Chassis Type : Unknown
Board Mfg : DELL
Board Product : FRU16K,DELL P/N
Board Serial : CN1374071J01LO
Board Part Number : 0DT021A00
Product Manufacturer : DELL
FRU Device Description : CPU1 (ID 176)
Device not present (Parameter out of range)
FRU Device Description : CPU2 (ID 176)
Device not present (Parameter out of range)
FRU Device Description : Storage (ID 2)

Board Mfg : DELL
Board Product : FRU256,DELL P/N 03K345A00
Board Serial : CN1374073M00CV
Board Part Number : 0FT781A01
FRU Device Description : PS 1 (ID 3)
Board Mfg : DELL
Board Product : PWR SPLY,750W,RDNT
Board Serial : CN1797272D28JI
Board Part Number : 0Y8132A05
<and so on>

Some other interesting commands from a monitoring standpoint are:

• Sdr – reports on various hardware sensors: temp, fan speed etc.
• Sel – System Event Log