[Beowulf] Anyone having IPMI problems on Intel S3200 series motherboards?

[Greg Lindahl]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 07:22:40AM -0400, Joe Landman wrote:

> We've found that, for nodes like this, when you reboot the machine, the  
> OS tears down the NIC setup, and things like arp responses suddenly  
> disappear.  Which means either keeping a log of arp -> IP mapping, as  
> the nics, with a torn down arp daemon, won't respond ...

A co-worker had a different symptom on his boxes -- rebooting &
powering off were fine, but if you ifconfigged down the interface in
Linux, IPMI would stop responding to arp. So, for example, if you were
logged into the console over ipmi and went to single user... d'oh!

> From our experience ... spend the extra several dollars on the NIC  
> version, and the cable.  It will save time/effort over the long haul.  
> Fewer surprises.

It also allows you to isolate IPMI traffic without using vlans.

-- g