[CentOS] OpenIPMI on a SunFire v20z

[Tom Lanyon]

Tom Lanyon wrote:

>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
>

List,

I've worked it out. For future reference to anyone, the version of
openipmi in the stock CentOS 4.1 2.6.9-11.EL kernel did not support the
SunFire v20z and v40z server IPMI interface. Either that or I had a
version of ipmitool which was too new for the version of openipmi in the
kernel.

Either way, I fetched the latest openipmi from
http://linux.dell.com/files/openipmi/ for RHEL4 (in my case it was
openipmi-33.7.RHEL4-ldkms.tar.gz), uncompressed that file and ran the
install script which installed openipmi driver sources as well as the
dkms framework.
After a quick bit of reading on how dkms worked, I built my new module with:
"dkms build -m openipmi -v 33.7RHEL4 -k `uname -r` -a x86_64
--kernelsourcedir=/usr/src/linux --config=/usr/src/linux/.config"

Then, an "/etc/init.d/ipmi start" worked a treat!

Hope this helps someone else in the future.

Cheers,
Tom

-- 
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