[Beowulf] non-proprietary IPMI card?

[Erwan Velu]

Tony Ladd wrote:
> The Broadcom 5721 NIC comes with IPMI capability. We use Dell PE850's which
> are equipped with dual onboard Broadcom 5721J NICS. One of the NICS has IPMI
> built in. You set up the IPMI in the BIOS-IP address, username, password-and
> then you can access over the same CAT5 cable. The regular ethernet and the
> IPMI have separate MAC addresses even though they share the same physical
> hardware. We use DHCP to set up all the network interfaces including IPMI. I
> have found it very useful for checking hardware error logs and rebooting
> crashed boxes remotely. Its worth noting that Dell rack servers come with
> IPMI, rails and cable management arms-all extras with Sun.
>   
I agree with you, I also own this boxes, it works like a charm.
It also works on all my DELL systems like the 1425.
I've also setup a floppy that configure the bios + the ipmi card. When I 
prepare a cluster, I boot the node on this floppy and everything is set.
For example, it sets the serial over ipmi. This features works well, I 
can follow what my box is doing, even more nicer I can enter the bios ;)

I love it.