[Freeipmi-users] ipmiconsole: "could not set errnum: current = 31, desired = 25"

[David O'Shea]

Hi all,

With FreeIPMI 1.4.5, using libipmiconsole from Python to talk to a Dell iDRAC, 
I've had intermittent errors.  To date, it normally seems like when 
libipmiconsole reports a timeout, when I look at the host's virtual console in 
the iDRAC web interface, I see evidence of other network issues (whether the 
fault of the iDRAC or my network, I don't know).  I  think I've seen errors 
like that roughly 3% of the times I run my script.

However, I just hit an issue that seems to (a) have only affected IPMI SOL and 
(b) involves an internal libipmiconsole error.  After IPMI SOL had been 
connected for about 6 minutes and about 800 lines of text had been sent, I got 
these messages:

(ipmiconsole_processing.c, _sol_bmc_to_remote_console_packet, 2801): 
hostname=silicon-bmc.adl.quantum.com; protocol_state=9h: scbuf_write: dropped 
data: dropped=14
(ipmiconsole_processing.c, _process_ctx, 4005): 
hostname=silicon-bmc.adl.quantum.com; protocol_state=Ah: closing session due to 
session timeout
(ipmiconsole_ctx.c, ipmiconsole_ctx_set_errnum, 1396): could not set errnum: 
current = 31, desired = 25

I gather the last message indicates an attempt to set the errnum to 
IPMICONSOLE_ERR_SESSION_TIMEOUT when it has already been set to 
IPMICONSOLE_ERR_INTERNAL_ERROR earlier, and this failed because the previous 
errnum hadn't been read yet?

The strange thing is I would have expected the earlier _INTERNAL_ERROR to cause 
an EOF, but even the timeout didn't cause one immediately - I kept receiving 
data from the file descriptor for another 2 seconds before I received an EOF, 
although admittedly from the timestamps in my log, which include milliseconds, 
it looks like the data was coming fairly continuously and therefore may have 
been buffered.

Am I using libipmiconsole incorrectly if I'm just reading from the file 
descriptor waiting for EOF to indicate an error?

I configure libipmiconsole with IPMICONSOLE_DEBUG_STDERR; should the previous 
_INTERNAL_ERROR have been accompanied by a message to stderr?  I couldn't find 
one.

If I enabled verbose tracing, would that possibly help to determine why I got 
the internal error and/or session timeout?  It would be good if I could 
understand a little more about the issue so I could report it to Dell.

I gather there is no way to provide a logging callback to libipmiconsole and I 
just have to choose from one of the following options?

 * STDOUT       - Output debugging to stdout
 * STDERR       - Output debugging to stderr
 * SYSLOG       - Output debugging to the Syslog
 * FILE         - Output debugging to files in current working directory

Thanks in advance,
David