Hi all! This thread is *most excellent*, a perfect repository of all the important stuff one needs to know before buying one of these strange and wonderful beasts.
I'm loving mine so far, however...
Does anyone off hand know any information about the "DCS" nodes? I purchased a c6100 from an ebay seller, and received 3 alike nodes which work perfectly, however the fourth node appears to be different from the rest.
I've had my C6100 for a month or so now, and I'm fairly certain the ebay seller isn't going to want to exchange nodes with me (and I'm already using this node in production... yes, silly me)
For starters, it only has 3 SATA ports, no mezzanine card slot, and (the kicker) IPMI does not appear to allow me to use the remote console.
I've been told that what I have is a "DCS" node, which apparently was built to spec for it's previous owner.
All nodes came out of the box with 1.32 BMC firmware loaded, and I was able to get most of them up and running just fine (with the exception of one unrelated node not allowing me to set the IP address, I reflashed the firmware with the DOS KCSFlash utility and used the "-c 0" option to delete the configuration).
However, this last node won't let me launch the Java console. The button is grayed out / disabled. If I edit the HTML page or use Chrome's javascript console to do "mainFrame.doLaunchJava()" I get the console to come up, however I can only see video. Mouse and keyboard do not work.
Upon further debugging, it appears that the BIOS does not even see the virtual keyboard/mouse that the BMC presents under normal circumstances.
This appears to be similar to this post:
Dell C6100 IPMI / BMC remote console "greyed out" - Colocation and Data Centers - Web Hosting Talk
and
http://forums.servethehome.com/processors-motherboards/2191-c6100-dcs-no-remote-console.html
In the first thread I've linked to, the solution appears to be to downgrade the IPMI firmware to 1.11, which I cannot find for the life of me.
Does anyone happen to have a link or a backup of 1.11 available somewhere I can download it?
I'm curious to see if this results in an easy fix for my issues.
If not, I've got the 1.32 firmware extracted, and I've separated the rootfs and www filesystems. It looks like you can actually enable SSH support to the BMC chip by sending a proper raw command via IPMITool which I have yet to fully figure out.
(If anyone's playing along at home, the files I'm looking at are in /usr/local/lib/libdell.so.0 , export "TelnetSSHRedirectCommand")
On boot, the system starts SSH and Telnet servers, however it adds a firewall rule to deny telnet and ssh access (confirm by running nmap against node IP).
Once I manage to get SSH access, it looks like I can simply do "modprobe usbe" to get the virtual USB devices to show up.
I'm 1000% sure this chip can physically do iKVM, since I can see video, just not mouse/keyboard, and Aspeed lists the chip as having virtual media capability which would imply USB endpoint support.
Any additional insight would be awesome! Thanks everyone for this useful thread!
EDIT: I now have SSH access for SOL, which is nice, but not exactly optimal (KVM would be best)
I got it to work with the following commands:
Code:
# Enable SSH service
ipmitool raw 0x30 0x01
ipmitool raw 0x30 0x03 0x<response from last command> 0x04 0x01 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x01 0x00
# Enable SOL redirection
ipmitool raw 0x30 0x01
ipmitool raw 0x30 0x03 0x<response from last command> 0x03 0x02 0x00 0x00 0x00 0x01 0x01
I might be able to break out of the SMASH CLI and get into maintenance mode to load the proper drivers for iKVM... I'm still curious if the older 1.11 firmware works though...