Re: [Freeipmi-users] ipmipower

[Al Chu]

Hey Kevin,

I've never played with the IBM BMCs before, so I can't be 100% sure.  

It does seem as though the core issue is an arp issue.  Ipmipower is
likely losing packets and timing out in sessions.  When you look at your
arp table (/sbin/arp -a), are the entries correct?  Are they possibly
changing?  At the beginning and after the arp is sent from the remote
BMC?

I could see a situation where your BMCs are configured with the wrong IP
and/or MAC address, and thus advertising IP -> MAC address mappings
incorrectly.  So it gets cached incorrectly for some period of time
(leading to packets sent to the wrong location and subsequent time
outs), but is later corrected by some other mechanism on your network
(normal IP traffic).  This is just a guess at this point.  Perhaps it'd
be a good idea to double check your BMC configuration to make sure the
IP/MAC/etc. are configured correctly.  You can use bmc-config --checkout
to check on this.

Also, are you using a different IP for the BMC than what you do for the
normal communication?  Perhaps something could be confused in there too.

Hopefully that's a starting point.  PLMK what you find out.

Al

On Mon, 2007-12-10 at 17:44 -0800, Kevin Fox wrote:
> Having problems with ipmipower. I have a 192 node cluster and am trying
> to use it with Powerman/ipmipower. Powerman -q is showing a large,
> random assortment of of nodes in the unknown state. It changes each run.
> 
> I went to the underlying ipmipower commands and stat in interactive mode
> comes up with a random set of timed out nodes.
> 
> The man page refers to setting fixed mac addrs in the arp tables, and I
> tried that.
> 
> Doing a tcpdump while doing an ipmiping shows the bmc, at roughly every
> two minutes, makes an arp request towards the machine running ipmiping
> and drops all packets on the floor while it is waiting for the arp
> response. So every bmc drops some packets. Also, when starting up
> ipmiping, it drops some packets while it does an initial arp request.
> 
> I think this is what is confusing ipmipower. I've tried lots of
> different settings for ipmipower but have been unable to find a set of
> options that come up with a reliable stat. Any ideas what I should set
> things to? (These nodes are IBMx3550's using an RSAII if that helps)
> 
> Thanks,
> Kevin
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Albert Chu
address@hidden
925-422-5311
Computer Scientist
High Performance Systems Division
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory