Thanks Terry. What exactly happens when I reset the IPMI? I saw those options, but was afraid of "hard booting".
The IPMI / BMC is in charge of most monitoring and remote management functions. It / they are separate from the regular CPU(s) on the board. That way they can take action if the regular CPU(s) are not functioning properly.
Rebooting the IPMI
should cause it to run through a sequence of re-reading all the sensors, resetting alarms, and so on. Normally this all happens "behind the back" of the regular CPU(s). There are [at least] 2 cases where this can lead to an unwanted reset of the system:
- If part of the IPMI boot sequence involves sending a reset signal to the rest of the system. This is unlikely, as updating the IPMI firmware (which involves rebooting the IPMI) would cause a reset of the system.
- If your operating system uses a hardware watchdog timer, the IPMI / BMC may be involved, and if the IPMI boot takes longer than the watchdog timeout, the system may reset due to that.
Neither of those things happen on my X8DTH-iF board, but Supermicro uses many versions of at least 2 different IPMI controllers, so other boards may behave differently.
If this is a one-time thing, I'd suggest just doing a normal power cyle / other reset process when it is convenient and you have your operating system shut down. If the alarms keep happening, you might want to pre-test to see if rebooting the IPMI leaves the operating system unaffected. Depending on what OS you are using, you could drop to single-user / soft halt state (Unix-like systems), pause in the startup process (normally F8 for Windows), etc. Then you'll know if rebooting the IPMI will be safe to use on a running system. On the other hand, if you get frequent alarms you might want to investigate / fix whatever is causing them.
