Appendix A - IPMI Checks

Software Installation Guide Table of Contents

Procedures provided in this appendix can be used to establish a level of confidence that your IPMI implementation is functional. Note that IPMI implementations can be problematic, and while these procedures can provide a level of confidence, absolute assurance that your particular IPMI implementation will operate error-free is not possible.

IPMI Platform Check

Perform the following steps:

  1. Identify the BMC model number on all servers.

  2. Identify the BMC firmware revision on all servers.

  3. Ensure that the BMC model number and firmware revision are the same on all servers.

  4. Using the fence\_ipmilan utility provided by the fence-agents RPM on Red Hat/CentOS, verify that the following commands complete successfully:

a. fence_ipmilan -a <BMC ADDRESS> -l <BMC USERNAME> -p <BMC PASSWORD> -o monitor

b. fence_ipmilan -a <BMC ADDRESS> -l <BMC USERNAME> -p <BMC PASSWORD> -o status

c. fence_ipmilan -a <BMC ADDRESS> -l <BMC USERNAME> -p <BMC PASSWORD> -o reboot

d. fence_ipmilan -a <BMC ADDRESS> -l <BMC USERNAME> -p <BMC PASSWORD> -o off

e. fence_ipmilan -a <BMC ADDRESS> -l <BMC USERNAME> -p <BMC PASSWORD> -o on

This process could run some combination of these commands over an extended period (e.g., monitor every 30 seconds or so with periodic power commands), for each BMC.

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