[Beowulf] recommendation on crash cart for a cluster room: full cluster KVM is not an option I suppose?

[Mark Hahn]

>> ./src/ipmitool -I open chassis status
>> Could not open device at /dev/ipmi0 or /dev/ipmi/0 or /dev/ipmidev/0:

that's local ipmi, which to me is quite beside the point.  ipmi is valuable
primarily for its out-of-band-ness - that is, you can get to it when 
the host is off or wedged.

> you're connecting locally over the IPMI bus. Here's the modules I see
> loaded on one of my RHEL5 Dell systems:
>
> ipmi_devintf           44753  0
> ipmi_si                77453  0
> ipmi_msghandler        72985  2 ipmi_devintf,ipmi_si
>
> If you can't get the IPMI devices working even after loading those
> modules, you might try looking at configuring your system's IPMI network
> interface manually. You should be able to do this during the boot
> process on any system (look for a device called "Service Processor" or
> "Baseboard Management Controller" after POST and before the OS boots).
> Some systems also have their own non-IPMI ways of configuring IPMI. If

on our dl145's, we don't normally have local ipmi enabled at all,
since it's inferior to remote.  but
       modprobe ipmi_devintf;modprobe ipmi_si
loads it, which can be useful for something like
       ipmitool user set password 3 foobar
or
       ipmitool mc reset

> you're on Dell you can use OpenManage's omconfig command-line tool.

IMO, proprietary tools are evil.  using them encourages vendors to 
diverge from open standards and hurts everyone, and in the long-term.

demand standards and just say "no" to non-standards, especially when 
venors claim that they're supra-standard features.  if we as computer
people have learned anything at all from our own history, 
it is that open standards drive everything in the end.