[Beowulf] Any industry-standards that allow automated BIOS modifications and dumping? IPMI cannot do it, can it?

[Rahul Nabar]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 5:01 PM, Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
>
> great: so they boot from a special PXE image I set up as a catchall.
> (dhcpd lets you define a catchall for any not nodes which lack a their own
> MAC-specific stanza.)  when nodes are in that state, I like to
> auto-configure
> the cluster's knowlege of them: collect MAC, add to dhcpd.conf, etc.  at
> this stage, you can also use local (open) ipmi on the node itself to
> configure the IPMI LAN interface:
>        ipmitool lan 2 set password pa55word
>        ipmitool lan 2 set defgw ipaddr 10.10.10.254
>        ipmitool lan 2 set ipsrc dhcp
>

Thanks to all the great responses I got for my last post I now have a
working IPMI solution!  Thanks again guys! This Beowulf list really
rocks! :)

In case it helps anyone else I thought it might be good to post some
points that had me stumped:

#####load the required drivers
modprobe ipmi_devintf
modprobe ipmi_si
modprobe ipmi_msghandler

###turn ipmi-over-lan on and set user and passwd. Set it to get its IP over DHCP
ipmitool lan set 1 access on
ipmitool lan set 1 ipsrc dhcp
ipmitool user set password 2 foopasswd

####use this to get the MAC corresponding to the BMC
ipmitool lan print

##put MAC into central dhcpd.conf

[of course, maybe some of my settings are naiive or erronous; feel
free to correct me]

I can pretty much remote monitor logs, stats, remote power reset etc.
The only two things I cannot:

(1) Can't do a Serial-on-LAN (SOL); My Dell server needs a special
card (read more money) for this function. That is unfortunate.

(2)Can't mod the BIOS settings or even dump them. Is there a way to
modify the BIOS settings via. IPMI (in general)

I did find the "bootdev" option. So I can change the boot seq. but not
the other BIOS settings.

Any "industry standard" to change BIOS settings unattended. Preferably over LAN?

-- 
Rahul