[Freeipmi-devel] FreeIPMI 0.4.1 Hostrange Support Information

[Al Chu]

One of the major new features in FreeIPMI 0.4.1 is hostrange support.
It is covered in far more detail in this doc:

http://www.gnu.org/software/freeipmi/freeipmi-hostrange.txt

However, I thought I'd give a bit of an introduction on this mailing
list for the people unfamiliar with other tools that offer similar
functionality.

Starting with FreeIPMI 0.4.0 hostrange support has been added into
ipmi-chassis, ipmi-fru, ipmi-raw, ipmi-sensors, ipmi-sel, bmc-info,
and ipmimonitoring (it has existed in ipmipower since 0.1.0).

Hostrange support gives you the ability to specify multiple hosts for an
ipmi command have that command executed across multiple hosts, out-of-
band, in parallel.  This can greatly decrease the time it would
otherwise take to execute them in serial via a shell script.  This can
save large amounts of time when executed across a large cluster.
Several options exist that will enable you to buffer or consolidate the
information to make it easier to read as well.  

As an example, the below runs bmc-info across a small 6 node cluster.
The output clearly shows that the firmware is not consistent across each
node of the cluster below.

# > bmc-info -h "pwopr[0-5]" -u XXX -p XXX -C
----------------
pwopr[0-1,5]
----------------
Device ID:         22
Device Revision:   1
Firmware Revision: 1.12
                   [Device Available (normal operation)]
IPMI Version:      2.0
Additional Device Support:
                   [Sensor Device]
                   [SDR Repository Device]
                   [SEL Device]
                   [FRU Inventory Device]
                   [Chassis Device]
Manufacturer ID:   28C5h
Product ID:        4h
Aux Firmware Revision Info: 38420000h
Channel Information:
       Channel No: 1
      Medium Type: 802.3 LAN
    Protocol Type: IPMB-1.0
       Channel No: 5
      Medium Type: Asynch. Serial/Modem (RS-232)
    Protocol Type: IPMB-1.0
----------------
pwopr[2-4]
----------------
Device ID:         22
Device Revision:   1
Firmware Revision: 1.23
                   [Device Available (normal operation)]
IPMI Version:      2.0
Additional Device Support:
                   [Sensor Device]
                   [SDR Repository Device]
                   [SEL Device]
                   [FRU Inventory Device]
                   [Chassis Device]
Manufacturer ID:   28C5h
Product ID:        4h
Aux Firmware Revision Info: 38420000h
Channel Information:
       Channel No: 1
      Medium Type: 802.3 LAN
    Protocol Type: IPMB-1.0
       Channel No: 5
      Medium Type: Asynch. Serial/Modem (RS-232)
    Protocol Type: IPMB-1.0

Al

-- 
Albert Chu
address@hidden
925-422-5311
Computer Scientist
High Performance Systems Division
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory