Ipmi / super micro motherboard support.

[James Riley]

Here is some quick background, and as a side note fog is an amazing tool, thank you for maintaining it.

I work for a company that manufactures servers basically a LA carte as per customers specs.
I originally stumbled upon fog trying to pxe boot a live CD run lshw and return serial numbers for all servers before they leave the building.
I ran into a couple of problems, work began pilling up and I disbanded my fog server project.

I am unsure as to how fog is doing registration and collecting hardware information, I figured you were probably implementing lshw or some dmidecode based program.

I am unsure if you are familiar with super micro motherboards but they have become one of the enterprise staples for my company and use IPMI which is basically KVM and system sensors over a dedicated nic. I am unsure how to return the Mac id for this interface and wether I can integrate something into the inventory command through fog.

Sorry if these questions are noon questions just hoping you can point me in the right direction.

I am going to resume my project shortly, and I’m probably going to use your 0.33 build tar.

Thanks

[StylusPilot]

Hi there,

from what I understand from your post you want FOG to be able to get the MAC address of the IPMI interface and add it to the inventory.

From what I know about the supermicro IPMI would not be possible without integrating some form of IPMI driver into the linux kernel FOG boots to gather this inventory.

The actual machine doesn’t see the IPMI as a network card as such, only a device in device manager (if it was windows)

When the kernel boots and gathers its inventory you might be able to get some information from dmidecode once said driver is installed but I imagine it would be limited information as its meant to go the other way ie get information about the system while logged in via IPMI interface, not the other way which could also be a security risk.

let us know how you get on as I have thought about this same issue with HP iLO before and could be handy to have a link to the IPMI/iLO from inside FOG inventory