Supermicro servers

BMC notes

Credentials

Can be set using ipmitool user list (to get the user's number) followed by ipmitool user set password USERNUM passwordstring from the server's OS. There is also probably a motherboard jumper to reset to defaults, but I have not tried this route. For systems as aged as the one I have, the default credentials are said to be ADMIN/ADMIN.

IPMI dedicated LAN interface

Can be configured for DHCP in the BIOS setup screen.

BMC SSH stuff

I enabled this in the BMC web UI under "ports". This can maybe be done from the server OS with some ipmitool magic incantation. But not sure what spell must be uttered for that.

The BMC runs an older version of Dropbear SSH and modern OpenSSH clients need a couple of options set to communicate with it. Specifically, I connect like so: ssh -v -o KexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group14-sha1 -o HostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa ADMIN@172.16.10.222. The CPU in the BMC is pretty limited, so be patient while waiting for the password prompt.

Serial over LAN

After logging in with SSH, the server can be started and a connection to a virtualized serial port established like so:

ATEN SMASH-CLP System Management Shell, version 1.04
Copyright (c) 2008-2009 by ATEN International CO., Ltd.
All Rights Reserved 


-> start /system1/pwrmgtsvc1
/system1/pwrmgtsvc1
start done... 

-> start /system1/sol1
/system1/sol1
press <Enter>, <Esc>, and then <T> to terminate session
(press the keys in sequence, one after the other)

The default serial port redirection setup provides ttyS1 (DOS and BIOS would call this COM2) access at 115200bps, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit. Which is pretty speedy. The virtualized serial port has not shown a tendency to drop characters even when pasting in long disk encryption passphrases. So I rate this as pretty good.