Re: [Freeipmi-users] ipmipower

[Al Chu]

On Mon, 2008-01-14 at 14:59 -0800, Kevin Fox wrote:
> In case it helps anyone, after a lot of probing and help from Al/IBM
> (thanks again), we discovered that some IBM BMC's have real problems
> with BMC's crashing if they see too many ethernet broadcasts. Isolating
> the BMC's to its own network helped, as was turning off some broadcast
> traffic the switches were doing, but the biggest help was setting the
> IP/MAC address of the node running ipmipower as the Gateway addresses in
> the BMC. The BMC's were each doing an ARP request back to the node
> running ipmipower and then some smallish random set were blowing their
> brains out under the resulting broadcast storm.

I was a little confused, so I had Kevin clarify in an out-of-thread e-mail:

By setting the ipmipower IP/MAC address as the Gateway address in the
remote BMCs (i.e. nodes you are trying to power control), it effectively
tricks the remote BMCs into not doing an arp.  Presumably b/c the BMC
always caches the gateway IP/MAC.

Thanks for the update Kevin.  Its a good trick that I'll have to keep in
the back of my mind.

Al

> Kevin
> 
> 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
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Freeipmi-users mailing list
> > address@hidden
> > http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freeipmi-users
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Albert Chu
address@hidden
925-422-5311
Computer Scientist
High Performance Systems Division
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory