Re: [Freeipmi-users] Serial Console hang during reboot

[Al Chu]

Hi Phil,

I haven't personally witnessed this, but I have heard of this happening
before.

There is no direct workaround, since the problem is on the motherboard.
My assumption is that internally the BMC-UART connection on the
motherboard is reset in some way during a reboot.  From the client
perspective, the IPMI connection is fine and dandy.

Although not available w/ the ipmiconsole tool itself, there is an
indirect workaround in the libipmiconsole library called
SERIAL_KEEPALIVE.  As the name suggests, it implements keepalive
messages via serial data instead of IPMI data (internally, it sends NUL
chars once in awhile).  That way, tools like Conman or Conserver can
detect the lost connection quickly and restart it.

If you're interested, I can add the workaround as an option to
ipmiconsole too.  I only left it in libipmiconsole b/c I considered this
a problem for Conman/Conserver, not for a user using ipmiconsole on the
command line.

Al

On Fri, 2011-08-26 at 20:27 -0700, Phil Pokorny wrote:
> Has anyone else had problems with the BMC and ipmiconsole app loosing "sync"
> during a reboot?
> 
> The serial console redirect is working fine, then we reboot the server and
> after the reset, there is no more serial console data.  Disconnecting and
> reconnecting to the BMC restores the flow of serial console data.
> 
> Is there a work-around switch in FreeIPMI to deal with this behavior?  Is
> there a "hangup" signal coming from the host that's being ignored by
> ipmiconsole?
> 
> System is a Supermicro motherboard with the Winbond BMC and AMI firmware.
> 
> Thanks,
> _______________________________________________
> Freeipmi-users mailing list
> address@hidden
> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/freeipmi-users
-- 
Albert Chu
address@hidden
Computer Scientist
High Performance Systems Division
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory