Michal Bachorik - Sun Microsystems - Prague Czech Republic wrote:
>
>>
>>> Regarding the "ipmitool" - I was in contact with guys working
>>> on/with "ipmitool" (Kevin.Song at Sun.COM, Hesam.Kohanteb at Sun.COM,
>>> turgo-ipmi at Sun.COM ..) to clarify some technical details regarding
>>> the BMC driver, and they did not raise any objections/concerns
>>> regarding porting of freeipmi to Open Solaris, they were rather
>>> looking forward for it. Does my answer satisfy your question, or
>>> there should be detailed description what functionality is covered
>>> by ipmitool/freeipmi and whether they do compete or complement?
>>
>> I think the ARC needs to be presented with why this is needed given
>> we have ipmitool.
> Answer directly from my director Fritz Ferstl
> (Friedrich.Ferstl at sun.com) :
>
> "We need freeimpi because it is used by 'Tortuga', the provisioning
> core of our OpenSolaris HPC SW stack. 'Tortuga' is open source and
> thus uses other open source components such as freeipmi. Usage of
> ipmitool has been assessed but freeipmi has found to be a better fit
> for the time being."
I'd like this spelled out in more detail. Specifically, *why* is
freeipmi deemed a better fit? Is it simply a matter of licensing, or
are the technical or architectural considerations here.
One of the problems we (Sun) have historically suffered from is *too
many* different service processor and platform management systems. I'm
personally not too keen to integrate another one.
Other questions (sorry if these seem obvious -- I've little experience
with service processor stuff since the E10K SSP. :-)
Can freeimpi and ipmitool coexist on the same platform? What int4tr
Is this really a Linux familiarity case?
IPMI specs seem to require signing an "Adopters agreement for IPMI" from
Intel. Has anyone checked to see if freeipmi has followed the necessary
steps so our legal bases are covered for integrating it?
>>
>> Also is there any impact to having these freeimpi daemons running
>> given Solaris already has FMA ?
> FMA is about a local machine auto-recovery while freeipmi is able to
> watch IPMI events from remote machines and perform for example:
> - power-cycle remotely if needed.
> - shut down/startup machine if needed
I don't think the question here was answered... what is the impact on
local FMA on a machine using freeipmi? Can freeipmi be used to monitor
a local machine and notify FMA? Is it necessarily true that there is
no overlap between these subsystems?
>>
>> What is the relationship between the daemons in this case and the
>> ipmievd one from PSARC/2006/412 ? Particularly in light of the long
>> discussion in that case about FAM.
>
> The "ipmievd" is just logging the IPMI events to syslog while freeipmi
> "bmc-watchdog" is able to also trigger an action upon receive of an
> IPMI event. The "ipmidetecd" is able to find new machines in specified
> subnets that are exposing an IPMI interface and add it to "freeipmi
> managed" hosts.
Have the security implications of this been properly reviewed by a
member of the security team? How does one ensure that a machine running
ipmidetecd and the watchdog doesn't reboot a system that it shouldn't?
Are there any authorization or authentication steps taken? Again, this
might all be covered as part of IPMI itself, and so seem to be obvious,
but not all the readers here (certainly not this author) are familiar
with IPMI.
-- Garrett
