[Freeipmi-users] Re: BMC IP

[Al Chu]

On Wed, 2006-07-26 at 14:37 -0700, Ennis, David wrote:
> Hi Al,
> 
> In my test setup node ha1 eth0 IP is 192.168.50.212 and ha1 eth0 is
> 192.168.50.213. In my initial setup of BMC bios at boot I set the ha1 BMC IP
> to 192.168.50.214 and ha2 BMC IP to 192.168.50.215. Is it correct to set the
> BMC IPs to be different than the normal public eth0 IP? 

You can do that.  It's neither correct nor incorrect.  Some people
configure their BMC's with a different IP than the OS IP.  Some people
keep them the same.  There are pros and cons to both.  

> I also noticed in the checkout for each that the MAC address for
> each is different from the eth0 MAC on each host. 

You should put the proper MAC address in.  Typically the manufacturer
has pre-configured the BMC with some MAC address which may or may not be
correct.

Note that if the machine has multiple ethernet ports, only one of them
is typically the IPMI ethernet port.  You'll have to guess and check to
determine which one it is (or look up in the manual which it is :-).

> Should I be able to ping the BMC IP address? I have not been able to but
> since it does not show up on the ifconfig on either host I was not overly
> surprised by that.

Ping as in the ping(8) (ICMP pings) utility? No.  You can however ping
using ipmiping or rmcpping, both of which come with FreeIPMI.

The IPMI card cannot really be considered a network card.  The best it
can be considered is a packet sniffer.  It sits on your motherboard's
ethernet NIC and will "eat up" and respond to IPMI packets.  It can do
nothing else.

Al

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