SuperMicro remote management

SuperMicro's IPMI sorta rocks.

Get the official IPMI software from here:

https://www.supermicro.com/en/solutions/management-software/ipmi-utilities

It can do a heck of a lot, but all I used it for was configuring the SOL (Serial Over LAN) bit rate. Don't know why, but 9.6 is the only one I have had success with:

# read -s pw
# ./SMCIPMITool host.to.manage ADMIN "$pw" sol bitrate 115.2

The SMCIPMITool also contains a terminal emulator/client thing (substitute bitrate 9.6 for activate in the above), but it intercepts both ^C and ^Z and so is rather useless for actual work. Enter ipmiutil!

Install by apt install ipmiutil, yum install ipmiutil, or however your poison dictates. Run as follows:

# ipmiutil sol -U ADMIN -Y -N host.to.manage -a

… or …

# read -s pw
# ipmiutil sol -U ADMIN -P "$pw" -N host.to.manage -a

Update Dec. 2020 – it appears that CentOS 8.0 has ditched ipmiutil in favour of ipmitool (from package of same name). The usage is slightly different, but works just the same:

# ipmitool -U ADMIN -a -H host.to.manage -I lanplus sol activate

Run resize (usually comes with the xterm package) to inform the session if the size of the terminal emulator window has changed. The serial console mechanism contains no provision for doing this automatically.