FreeIPMI 1.6.1 Released With Performance Improvements, Better IPv6 Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeIPMI 1.6.1 Released With Performance Improvements, Better IPv6 Support

Albert Chu of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the release this weekend of FreeIPMI, the GNU project implementing Intelligent Platform Management Interface v1.5/2.0 support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeIPMI-1.6.1-Released

[dwagner]

Last time I checked, the most relevant shortcoming of FreeIPMI was that it did not support remote viewing of the actual VGA output of the BIOS - this functionality was only available via (horrible) proprietary IPMI clients distributed by the mainboard manufacturers.

Has this situation changed?

[puleglot]

Last time I checked, the most relevant shortcoming of FreeIPMI was that it did not support remote viewing of the actual VGA output of the BIOS - this functionality was only available via (horrible) proprietary IPMI clients distributed by the mainboard manufacturers.

Has this situation changed?

AFAIK iKVM is not part of IPMI standard. Depending on BMC firmware vendor and product generation it could be a proprietary protocol or slightly modified VNC.

[jabl]

AFAIK iKVM is not part of IPMI standard.

Yes, this is correct. The IPMI standard only has the serial console. It's a bit tedious to set up, usually requires enabling some non-default settings in the BIOS as well as kernel boot parameters. But once you get it to work, it's fairly robust and quick; your future self will thank you for setting it up and not having to deal with those vendor Java or ActiveX horror shows.

[numacross]

Yes, this is correct. The IPMI standard only has the serial console. It's a bit tedious to set up, usually requires enabling some non-default settings in the BIOS as well as kernel boot parameters. But once you get it to work, it's fairly robust and quick; your future self will thank you for setting it up and not having to deal with those vendor Java or ActiveX horror shows.

Newer Supermicro BMCs are finally using HTML5 for the KVM, but sadly they refuse to backport it to older ones... Also you still need the Java version for stuff like ISO redirecting.