I have a Sun Fire X2100 with the SMDC (IPMI) option card, which I fitted myself.
The machine is installed with Solaris 10 1/06 from a downloaded DVD ISO.
I have downloaded the X2100 supplemental CD v1.3 and flashed the BIOS up to 1.09 and the SMDC firmware up to 4.12. I have configured the IPMI IP address, netmask, and passwords using the util.exe tool.
Using ipmitool 1.8.7 compiled from source on a nearby Solaris 8 box (with
enable-solaris-opt disable-shared) the IPMI seems to be working fine on the second (bge) ethernet port as expected:
$ ./src/ipmitool -H 192.168.1.11 -U Admin -P xxx sensor list
DDR 2.6V | 2.600 | Volts | ok | na | 2.496 | na | na | 2.704 | na
CPU core Voltage | 1.416 | Volts | ok | na | 0.796 | na | na | 1.556 | na
VCC 3.3V | 3.300 | Volts | ok | na | 3.146 | na | na | 3.454 | na
VCC 5V | 5.044 | Volts | ok | na | 4.732 | na | na | 5.252 | na
VCC 12V | 11.970 | Volts | ok | na | 11.403 | na | na | 12.600 | na
Battery Volt | 2.941 | Volts | ok | na | 2.001 | na | na | 3.454 | na
CPU TEMP | 40.000 | degrees C | ok | na | 0.000 | na | na | 80.000 | na
SYS TEMP | 29.000 | degrees C | ok | na | 0.000 | na | na | 55.000 | na
CPU FAN | 8820.000 | RPM | ok | na | 4950.000 | na | na | 18000.000 | na
SYSTEM FAN3 | 2610.000 | RPM | ok | na | 990.000 | na | na | 17010.000 | na
SYSTEM FAN1 | 2790.000 | RPM | ok | na | 990.000 | na | na | 17010.000 | na
SYSTEM FAN2 | 8820.000 | RPM | ok | na | 4950.000 | na | na | 18000.000 | na
Apart from this I am having problems.
Firstly, I can't get the "bmc" driver to load on Solaris. I've tried "devfsadm -i bmc" and a reconfiguration boot. The devfsadm command just gives me the error "devfsadm: driver failed to attach: bmc". I found one other person having this same problem using Google but no-one had suggested a solution. The only patch I am aware of for the bmc driver is 120081-xx, but 120081-02 is included in Solaris 10 1/06 and therefore installed.
Without the "bmc" driver I cannot use IPMI locally to monitor the machine status. This is less important than the remote network connection to IPMI, but I still want it to work, and it may be indicative of some underlying problem.
Secondly, I can't get the IPMI to share the network port with the OS. Currently I have the IPMI on 192.168.1.11 on bge0 (second port) and the OS on 192.168.1.10 on nge0 (first port), but I really want to get this working on a single port if I can to avoid the cost of the extra switch port.
I'm pretty sure that it's possible to share both the network port and even the IP address. As far as I know the X2100 is based on the Tyan 2865 motherboard. A friend uses these motherboards and IPMI cards under Linux at work and says that it shares the port fine, and I have heard anecdotal evidence that this is possible under Solaris. I also found this blog entry:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/shepler?entry=port_623_or_the_mount
suggesting that the V65x Sun Xeon servers could share the port and even the IP address for IPMI.
Simply plumbing the bge0 interface from Solaris stops the IPMI responding (whether or not I then follow up by assigning the port an address) until the server is rebooted. Unplumbing the interface does not start the IPMI responding again. Because I can only access the IPMI over the network I don't know if the IPMI card stops working altogether or just loses its communication through the ethernet port.
Additionally, I have at least once had the IPMI simply stop responding remotely on its own IP address, even in the absence of any interface plumbing provocation, though this hasn't happened since I turned on the "Broadcast ARP" option with the util.exe program.
Can anyone shed light? Does this sound like faulty hardware, or do I need to update some firmware or driver? I have checked all of the cables inside the case and all seem to be properly seated.
The IPMI card is a Tyan M3290, and the util.exe tool seems the same as that supplied by Tyan. The IPMI card ("SMDC") manual is at:
ftp://ftp.tyan.com/software/tso/m3290/manuals/M3289M3290%20v1.0_0915.pdf
but this doesn't mention Solaris.
Tyan's support site also mentions flashing the Broadcom Ethernet ASIC firmware, and provides the files in:
ftp://ftp.tyan.com/software/tso/m3290/firmware/s2865/BCM5721/6.09/
Is this appropriate on an X2100? Sun supply the SMDC firmware but not the Broadcom ASIC firmware, so I'm concerned that I could break something by doing this.
I'd be grateful for any help anyone can offer.
Thanks!
Martin