[Beowulf] Odd SuperMicro power off issues

[Bogdan Costescu]

On Mon, 8 Dec 2008, Gerry Creager wrote:

> I'm wondering if there might be a single voltage that's over-taxed 
> and that opening a breaker in that supply might cause the 
> halt-to-quiescent while leaving IPMI alive...

I don't quite understand the "opening a breaker in that supply might 
cause the halt-to-quiescent" part, but just to clear up some of the 
things I've written before: if the computer crashes, I expect IPMI to 
tell me that the computer is in "on" power state; I might be able to 
use the IPMI console redirection to see what (if any) is printed on 
the console, like OOM, kernel oops, etc. In the behaviour that I have 
described previously for these SuperMicro boards, IPMI reported power 
to be "off", similar to the result of running "/sbin/poweroff" from 
Linux or sending a "power off" IPMI command; at the end of these 2 
commands there is no console output anymore as the CPU is powered off. 
So somehow the BMC was notified that the computer is not "on" 
anymore... or maybe it was the BMC which made the decision to turn off 
in the fisrt place.

-- 
Bogdan Costescu

IWR, University of Heidelberg, INF 368, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany
Phone: +49 6221 54 8240, Fax: +49 6221 54 8850
E-mail: bogdan.costescu at iwr.uni-heidelberg.de