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

[Joe Landman]

Henning Fehrmann wrote:
> Hi Greg,
> On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 01:28:50AM -0700, Greg Lindahl wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 09:24:09AM +0200, Henning Fehrmann wrote:
>>
>>> We also had this problem with Supermicro boards and IPMI cards in a large
>>> scale. Finally we found a solution by upgrading the firmware of the NICs which are
>>> actually from Intel.
>> I take it that you didn't get the version with the dedicated ethernet
>> port for IPMI?
> 
> Correct, we do not have IPMI cards with a dedicated ethernet port, at
> least for the nodes.

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 ...

... or avoid buying the no-NIC BMCs.  We started doing that a few years 
ago, as our customers were getting annoyed by those problems (and our 
'solution' of maintaining arp tables with a script to force the mac->ip 
mapping, while working, was at best a hack).

 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.


-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
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