OpenBMC, a distribution for baseboard management controllers

Posted Apr 13, 2016 1:07 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
Parent article: OpenBMC, a distribution for baseboard management controllers

I would like to second and third the previous comments. The proprietary BMC controllers I've worked with (with the possible exception of Dell's iDRAC) are garbage. I have a server 200km away whose BMC is hung and cannot be restarted even with a hard reboot command from ipmitool.

I'm going to have to power that sucker down by physically unplugging the power cords and hope the BMC comes back, and I can't do that until I schedule a visit to the data centre. Grrrrrr....

OpenBMC, a distribution for baseboard management controllers

Posted Apr 13, 2016 4:41 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Its funny how sometimes additional technology and complexity are added to attempt to increase reliability but end up causing a bunch of their own problems. Usually we think this is a net positive but I'm not always so sure, I've seen plenty attempts at HA actually cause more outages than they ever prevented, and one of the goals of IPMI is to increase service uptime by allowing you to reboot servers quickly when the OS fails.

OpenBMC, a distribution for baseboard management controllers

Posted Apr 13, 2016 22:13 UTC (Wed) by jhhaller (guest, #56103) [Link]

Another advantage is that you don't have to buy the advanced BMC option for your hardware, nor licenses for the proprietary management system. The next step is open software to interface with OpenBMC to do things like rack-level power management.

OpenBMC, a distribution for baseboard management controllers

Posted Apr 14, 2016 2:37 UTC (Thu) by mebrown (subscriber, #7960) [Link]

Funny story: Dell builds their iDRAC 8 and 9 as well as their Chassis Management Controller on top of Yocto.

I wonder how hard it would be to pull in the openbmc layer?