[Beowulf] Remote console management

[Steffen Persvold]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bruce Allen [mailto:ballen at gravity.phys.uwm.edu]
> Sent: Friday, September 23, 2005 10:48 AM
> To: Steffen Persvold
> Cc: johnh at streamline-computing.com; beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: RE: [Beowulf] Remote console management
> 
> > SOL is transparent to the OS. It acts as a virtual serial port (i.e
> > console=ttyS0,15200n will work fine on Linux). You might have to use a
> > different device than ttyS0 though, it depends on the motherboard and
> BMC
> > implementation.
> 
> Two questions:
> 
> [1] Do ALL IPMI 2.0 cards support this?

I would say yes, however I have only tested onboard/builtin implementations
from SUN/HP/Dell/IBM/Intel not Tyan, Supermicro and others. You should get a
sample to test out and/or ask the vendor. The good news is that if the
motherboard supports SOL, Linux would have no problems using it.

> 
> [2] Where is the serial output buffered?  If the node is hung, where does
> one look to find the last few thousand characters of output?
> 

That depends on how you implement it in the other end. It is not buffered by
the BMC itself, but can have a linux process attached to it that logs to
file for example. Google for "conserver" ;)

Cheers,
Steffen