Re: [Freeipmi-users] Problem pasting data into ipmiconsole

[David O'Shea]

Hi Albert,

Thanks for your reply.  A workaround where I invoked an API to set the maximum 
number of characters sent at a time sounds fine, I could do some experiments to 
work out what value works with the iDRAC and report back so that this can be 
documented.

Going back to my code where I want to interact with libipmiconsole, I assume 
that with the current version of libipmiconsole, if I was to just write() to 
the file descriptor in smaller chunks, that wouldn't help because 
libipmiconsole might combine the chunks into a larger chunk that exceeds what 
the iDRAC supports.  Is that correct?

Thanks in advance,
David

> Subject: Re: [Freeipmi-users] Problem pasting data into ipmiconsole
> From: address@hidden
> To: address@hidden
> CC: address@hidden
> Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 10:23:15 -0700
> 
> Hi David,
> 
> Lets see on line 1001, we see the packet that is being sent w/ your
> data.  You can see in the character_data buffers lots of "20h 30h" hex,
> which is ascii spaces and 0's.
> 
> As you deduced properly, the remote BMC is nacking the packet.
> According to the IPMI spec, "the BMC is unable to accept all character
> data from this packet."
> 
> Well that sucks.  It seems the Dell BMC just can't handle that much
> simultaneous data being sent.  I tried this on some motherboards I have
> locally that are not Dells and these BMCs were able to handle much
> larger cut & pastes with ease.
> 
> We could program a workaround/option into ipmiconsole/libipmiconsole
> that could max-cap the number of characters a "SOL Remote Console to
> BMC" packet is allowed to send at the same time, to alleviate this
> situation for your BMC.  libimiconsole could even be smart enough to
> recognize when too many NACKs happen in a row and try to decrease the
> characters sent in one packet, although I'm not sure how hard that would
> be to program right now.  It's a bit more sophisticated and would take
> time, but the workaround option would be much easier.
> 
> Al
> 
> On Fri, 2014-06-27 at 12:04 +1000, David O'Shea wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > With version 1.2.1-6.el6_5 RPM from CentOS 6, when I ran 'ipmiconsole'
> > and pasted in a fairly small amount of data (maybe 15 or so
> > characters), I got "[error received]: excess retransmissions sent".  I
> > got a similar issue when writing about that much data from a Python
> > script using libipmiconsole.  I figured this means I should move on to
> > a newer version.
> > 
> > With version 1.4.3, which I built from source with debugging enabled,
> > it seems like I need to paste a bit more data to trigger problems.  In
> > this case, I don't get an error like the above, instead things just
> > seem to get "stuck": I never seem to get a response from the remote
> > system, but sending an escape sequence still works.
> > 
> > I started ipmiconsole, pasted " 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
> > 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0" (54 characters long), then after a few seconds I used
> > ".." to terminate:
> > 
> > """
> > $ [...]/freeipmi-1.4.3/ipmiconsole/ipmiconsole -h hostname -u admin -p 
> > calvin  -e . --debug --debugfile
> > [SOL established]
> > 
> > [closing the connection]
> > """
> > 
> > The target is a Dell iDRAC7 with firmware version 1.56.55.
> > 
> > I put some of the log file that was generated up at
> > https://gist.github.com/dcoshea/e7a15e34395c09da2f81 (after replacing
> > the hostname with "hostname").  If you go to line 889
> > [https://gist.github.com/dcoshea/e7a15e34395c09da2f81#file-gistfile1-txt-L889],
> > this seems to be the part that relates to when I pasted in the text.
> > It seems that ipmiconsole keeps re-sending the data and the iDRAC
> > keeps responding with NACKs.  The entire log contains 2000 of these
> > messages:
> > 
> > (ipmiconsole_processing.c, _sol_bmc_to_remote_console_packet, 2672): 
> > hostname=hostname; protocol_state=9h: SOL packet NACKED: 
> > accepted_character_count: accepted_character_count = 0,  
> > c->session.sol_input_character_data_len = 54
> > 
> > Thanks in advance,
> > David
> >                                       
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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
> 
>