[Freeipmi-users] Help in using out-of-band features of ipmi for system monitoring ....

[Jayaraman. R. Iyer]

Greetings,
   I am newbie to freeipmi. I have been trying to use freeipmi to monitor a 
bunch of dell/IBM/hp blades in the lab. These blades could have any x86 
based OS installed on them.  To keep the scenario simple I have just two 
machines in a dedicated network, with one being the test machine and the 
other from where I am sending ipmi commands and also looking for receiving 
ipmi –events.

The primary aim for me is to be able to monitor any system going down or 
coming up or system crash. To accomplish this I believe ( I could be wrong) 
I can use the out-of-band ipmi-pef event’ing mechanism. But so far I haven’t 
had much luck to see any events getting generated when the system goes down 
or comes up or for any such failure.  I can say this for sure, because I 
have a network sniffer (ethereal) running on the same network and that 
doesn’t catch anything to indicate that an ipmi-pef (traps) were being sent. 
All this is in spite of the fact that I have configured the machines using 
the vendor supplied tool to enable ipmi- events for all possible failure 
scenarios’s, set the destination ip address where these events need to be 
directed.
Also I tried to use the fish/ipmi-pef, tools (from release 0.2.1) that come 
with freeipmi to see stuff out of band. But I get the error indicating that 
out-of-band operations are not supported, which seems to contradict with 
stuff mentioned in the freeipmi mailing lists. (Maybe I am missing something 
here.).

Any help from all those ipmi-guru’s and ipmi-users in proceeding further in 
trying to understand this stuff better to be able to use ipmi-pef 
(event’ing) for system monitoring would be a great help.

Thanks in advance,
- Jay