[CentOS] OpenIPMI on a SunFire v20z

Tom Lanyon

tom at netspot.com.au
Wed Oct 5 05:12:39 UTC 2005


Hi all,

New to the list and (mostly) new to CentOS. We have just moved from
running RHEL to CentOS on our main production servers.

Anyway, I am configuring a couple of new SunFire v20z servers here at
the moment and trying to get the systems' management interfaces to work
fully under CentOS.

First issue was trying to install the openipmi RPM from the CD that came
with the SunFires, this RPM installs the source for the openipmi kernel
drivers and then builds them as kernel modules. First I had to get the
kernel source installed (i used the kernel SRPM to install, then did an
rpmbuild to create the patched source directory), however I'm now
receiving a whole bunch of errors whilst trying to compile the IPMI
driver 'ipmi_devintf_src.c' file because of what looks to be
incompatibilities with the kernel.
My presumption is that this openipmi driver is intented for 2.4.x kernels.

So I moved on and discovered that openipmi is built into the 2.6.9-11.EL
kernel which is installed by default. I tried inserting these modules:
    ipmi_devintf
    ipmi_msghandler
    ipmi_si
    ipmi_watchdog
Which produced the following syslog output:
    Oct  5 00:02:00 langoria kernel: ipmi message handler version v33
    Oct  5 00:02:00 langoria kernel: ipmi device interface version v33
    Oct  5 00:02:03 langoria kernel: IPMI System Interface driver
version v33, KCS version v33, SMIC version v33, BT version v33
    Oct  5 00:02:03 langoria kernel: ipmi_si: Found SMBIOS-specified
state machine at I/O address 0xca2
    Oct  5 00:02:03 langoria kernel:  IPMI kcs interface initialized
    Oct  5 00:02:07 langoria kernel: IPMI Watchdog: driver version v33

I thought, "Wonderful! It's working!", and was happy to see that the
ipmi device existed:
    crw-r--r--  1 root root 254, 0 Oct  4 23:27 /dev/ipmi0
(However, it seems like its always been there - not sure why. Doesn't
CentOS use udev?)

I installed the userland ipmitool software and all was peachy.

...But my excitement and fun was ruined when I actually tried to use the
tool:
    [root at langoria ~]# ipmitool sel
    Could not open device at /dev/ipmi0 or /dev/ipmi/0: No such file or
directory
    Get SEL Info command failed

Seems like the OpenIPMI drivers aren't binding to the device?

Basically, I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience running
openipmi on CentOS 4.1 running the default 2.6.9-11.EL kernel  and can
offer any assistance to me?

Regards,
Tom Lanyon

-- 
Tom Lanyon
Systems Administrator
NetSpot Pty Ltd
183 Melbourne Street, North Adelaide, 5006
Ph: +618 8361 6800   Fax: +618 8361 6811
Email: tom at netspot.com.au




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