Re: serial/ether console & ramblings

> Eric Anderson wrote:
> 
> > Danny Braniss wrote:
> >
> >> hi,
> >>     I was about to plunge in and 'try' to cleanup the serial console
> >> stuff, when it downed on me that newer machines are arriving without
> >> serial
> >> port! there goes that idea. So USB/serial dongle came to mind, might
> >> work, but messy, FireWire is not universaly available.
> >> So, why not serial over ethernet? IPMI 'was' to have solved
> >> this, but it will (if at all) work on server class MB only, and im still
> >> looking for a Unix Viewer.
> >>
> >>     In my case, i have been using the serial console to debug stuff, but
> >> being of the old school, i try to stay away from debuggers :-), so
> >> printf and stack trace will do.
> >>
> >>     So here are some of my quesions:
> >>         o - is there some standard? ok, refrase, are there some
> >>              standards?
> >>         o - any WIP?, i'm checking out Robert Watson's ethercons
> >>         o - any great ideas?
> >
> >
> > There are a couple of ports that seem to try to use IPMI.  I haven't
> > tried them yet though.  (sysutils/freeipmi and sysutils/ipmitool).
> >
> > I can tell you that being about to do serial over ethernet (and
> > possibly power cycling) would be incredibly handy.
> >
> > Eric
> >
> >
> >
> NIC drivers have to be made aware of IPMI in order for it to function
> when a shared NIC is used.  This is not the case with the bge driver, at
> the very least.  See:
> 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/htdig/freebsd-net/2005-March/thread.html#6725
> 
> This is also a very big issue for us and we're considering hiring a
> contractor to get the relevant parts put into the driver...
> 
i guess IPMI means different things to different people.
if it's hardware (not a software emulation), then it has some nice things:
1 - fiddling with the box from far away, without intervention
    of the OS, like 
	1.1 - turning off (sometimes on will work too :-),
	1.2 - turning on/off the id light- cool if you have many boxes - i used
	  to laugh at this, till i found out that on some u1 boxes there is
          no place to put a label in the back.
	1.3- finding out all kind of stuff, like when was the box assembled,
          etc.
2- SOL, serial over lan: if this would realy work, then no need for
   all the cables/kvm etc.

point 1.1 and 1.2 is done, so we can via a cli do those things, but it only
saves a trip to the computer room. 1.3 is for the nit-picky, i have some
60 u1's, and knowing the status of the FRUs is not that helpful.

point 2, on the other hand is exiting, not only because of the cabling, but
being able to access the console when needed, without having to connect the
serail port (which are disappearing).

so is there a client for SOL that runs under FreeBSD?
(either IPMI 1.5 or 2.0)

danny