c6100 IPMI and RAID help

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WLGreen

New Member
Jan 4, 2019
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Hey guys - I need some help with my C6100, and not having much luck hunting around.

Its the 24 bay model, 2 nodes have 48GB, and 2 nodes have 24GB, all nodes are running dual E5530's (I have 6 E5649's to put into 3 of the nodes, just haven't gotten around to it yet). I purchased it a couple of years ago, and really haven't done much to it up to this point - I had a single disk on each node, and used it for testing some things in a lab environment where I was right in front of it, and it was running some pretty light workloads, and the host and vm's were getting blown away pretty regularly so that I could start from scratch.

At this point, I'd like to set it up and use it in a more permanent fashion, specifically, I'd like to get the IPMI up and running so that I can manage it remotely, as well as setup RAID with some additional storage beyond a single disk. I'm adding an intel PRO/1000 quad NIC to one of the nodes and will be using it to run Sophos, will be using a second node as a hyper-v host to host 3-5 vm's, and will be using a 3rd node to run a media server (or maybe a NAS) - the 4th node will probably continue to be used as a "lab" to test some new things out as needed.

I'm running into a couple of issues:

1 - All 4 of the nodes came with the LSI RAID card installed in the mezzanine slot, but the only options for RAID levels are IM, IME, and IS. After doing some digging it appears that these translate into RAID1, RAID1e, and RAID0 respectively. I'd like to be able to setup RAID 10 - my plan for a couple of the nodes was to run disks 1 and 2 as RAID1 and host the OS there, then run disks 3-6 as RAID10 and use that as storage.

It seems that the LSI SAS2008 RAID card supports RAID1 and RAID10, while the card that I have does not (I haven't pulled it yet to get model numbers off of it, so not sure what card it is specifically). My question here is: if I purchase an LSI SAS2008 card, is it a direct swap for the existing card in the mezzanine slot, and will all of the cables be the same? Most of the info on the LSI SAS2008 seems to be for folks that didnt have a RAID card at all, and includes the risers and/or cables. Are the cables and riser different or can I reuse the ones that I have with the LSI SAS2008?


2 - I'm unable to access the IPMI on any of the nodes. I can get the login page to come up, but am unable to login. I've tried every possible combination of login info that I can think of or find online, and no luck. I've tried root/root, root/calvin, admin/admin, admin/password, etc, etc, etc.

Is there a way to reset the IPMI password on these? I'd really like to have the remote control and monitoring available. I was able to find some reference online to using IPMI tools to possibly reset the password, but didnt find a good guide on exactly how to step through it - I'll admit to being utterly ignorant when it comes to linux, so while I could step through a well written guide, I haven't been able to find one. Most of the info that I found on it seems to assume a certain level of linux competence, and familiarity with IPMItools (which I'll admit that I dont have).


3 - I'm also having a problem with one of the nodes where it doesn't recognize the keyboard until the OS boots up. One time (after trying repeatedly) I was able to get into the configuration settings of the node, but haven't been able to since then, and cant get to any of the other configs (like the LSI config) either. As soon as the node boots into windows it recognizes the keyboard, but until then, it doesn't. Its the same keyboard that I use for the other nodes where it works fine for accessing the configuration settings so not a keyboard issue, and I dont think its an issue with the usb port (though I've tried both on the problem node) since it recognizes the keyboard as soon as windows boots. I'm really lost on this one.



Looking forward to spending some time getting to know this beast once I can get these issues ironed out.



Thanks for the help!
JR
 

frogtech

Well-Known Member
Jan 4, 2016
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1. You probably have the really old 1068E mezzanine adapter. It should use the same cabling, so yes, a direct swap should be easy. The cable you use should be the one that on one end is mini SAS and 2 SATA + SPGIO, to 6 sata + SPGIO on the other end. I think the DP/N for the mezz card is XX2X2. You should be able to find it pretty easily on ebay relatively inexpensively.

2. You should be able to use something like ipmiutil or ipmicfg to reset the BMC password. Both are available on Windows I believe. Both tools come with self explanatory documentation.

3. Not really sure on this one, you may have to wait until you can reset the IPMI password on this one and use an iKVM viewer to get into the BIOS so you can check out the options.