Manuel Bouyer wrote:

> real remote management). My ideal system would be managable from LAN
> with standard tools like telnet or ssh, and would give access to the system's
> serial console, as well as power and reset switches. I'm not sure this
> exists.

Sun v20z/v40z (soon to be discontinued) contain a service processor
claiming IPMI 2.0 compatibility. The SP has 2 RJ-45 sockets which can be
used to build a separate network management LAN by daisy-chaining all those
1HE boards together.

> However most vendors now seems to support the IPMI standard. Is use a custom
> UDP protocol, but maybe some boards also support telnet or ssh connectivity ?

The service processor on those Sun machines is running Linux on a
PowerPC (4XX?) CPU and can be accessed through ssh. I don't know which
ssh version (1/2) it supports.

I don't know much about the UDP protocol you mention (Remote Management
Control Protocol). ipmitool (http://ipmitool.sourceforge.net) uses this
protocol to access the IPMI boards over the LAN. If your operating system
has the necessary driver (Solaris and Linux do, don't know about FreeBSD)
you can also use ipmitool on the local machine.

Somewhere on my harddisk, there is a pkgsrc package for ipmitool waiting
to be committed since last summer.

> Also, I'm not sure the console is seen as a serial port on the system side

I _think_ the IPMI board really connects to one of the serial ports of
the machine.

> (I've seen mails suggesting some supermicro IPMI boards would be snooping
> the video memory for characters, slowing down the whole system).

Modern x86 server boards often have something called "console
redirection" where the BIOS screen is periodically scanned and sent over
the chosen serial port. A real pain with 9600 but bearable with 115200
bps. Sending the correct key strokes to the BIOS (eg, CTRL-ALT-DEL) is
...difficult.

If you log on to the SP of a v20z and want to use the serial console
you have to set the speed everywhere to the same value (SP, BIOS, your
operating system). This way, I discovered even Windows 2003 has now some
kind of emergency access over the serial port :-).

> Has anyone experience with IPMI boards (from any vendors) ?

Only the v20z so far. I may be able to get a look at a Sun x2100 soon.

ciao
     Klaus