IPMItool and BMC management

It is a wonderful experience to be able to manage and monitor your hardware independently from the host OS. This post is just about a few commands I use to manage
BMC (or whatever you call it) on my PC. It was surprising for me to see that I can use the same ethernet interface for both ipmi operations and regular network traffic due to which you don’t need to have an extra interface. This is really great! Once ipmitool is installed, connect to management board:

# ipmitool -H 192.168.1.1 -U root -P secret123 shell
ipmitool>

I like the option “shell” because it saves you not to type all those commands, password again and again.Now lets see the chassis status

ipmitool> chassis status
System Power         : off
Power Overload       : false
Power Interlock      : inactive
Main Power Fault     : false
Power Control Fault  : false
Power Restore Policy : previous
Last Power Event     :
Chassis Intrusion    : inactive
Front-Panel Lockout  : inactive
Drive Fault          : false
Cooling/Fan Fault    : false
Sleep Button Disable : not allowed
Diag Button Disable  : allowed
Reset Button Disable : not allowed
Power Button Disable : allowed
Sleep Button Disabled: false
Diag Button Disabled : true
Reset Button Disabled: false
Power Button Disabled: false

Power is off. Let’s power on the machine!

ipmitool> chassis power on
Chassis Power Control: Up/On

You can also pass to options to the chassis power command like;

ipmitool>chassis power soft
 ipmitool>chassis power off

Soft option does a graceful shut down if your OS supports ACPI.
Off option just powers off the system