How do I install ipmitool ?

[Fritz]

Googled this and came up with an enormous amount of gibberish. As I understand it, ipmitool is a cli only tool. Why the heck does it require a months worth of typing to install? I need it either on Linux or Windows but preferably on both. Is there an understandable way to get it installed?

PS: All the instructions I've been able to find ASSUME you know shit that I don't.

TIA

 

[USER189364]

What OS are you wanting to install it on? If you are running Linux based distro, it is as simple as:

sudo [installer] ipmitool

So, For Ubuntu, for example, it would be:

sudo apt install ipmitool

 

[Fritz]

What OS are you wanting to install it on? If you are running Linux based distro, it is as simple as:

sudo [installer] ipmitool

So, For Ubuntu, for example, it would be:

sudo apt install ipmitool

Thank you sir. I knew there had to be an easy way.

 

[USER189364]

No problem at all. My issues with IPMItool generally come after installation

Dell and lack of good fan control...

"No no, we hide these settings from the user in iDRAC for their BENEFIT...." Gah.

 

[Fritz]

I have a 2U Quanta server that's beyond loud. I was planning on doing a fan transplant which would have been a nasty endeavor due to the facts that the fans are dual back to back 80mm's and I suspect the plugs aren't wired as per standards. I found the commands to set the fan speeds using ipmitools then ran into the problem of ipmi install which you handily solved for me. Now just have to find the time to fire it up and give it a go. To Supermicro's credit, they make it easy to adjust the fan speeds, wish they all did. I'm hard of hearing and ti still hurts my ears.

 

[USER189364]

By all accounts, Supermicro is worth the price premium over used dell/HP hardware if you can find a good deal. They seem to have the best ability to have control over your hardware.

Dell loves to play the game of giving you some power, and then taking it back. HP loves to lock things behind support contracts (updates and such) and generally been burned a few times with them.

I have been tempted by Quanta and other brands, but getting updates/info/troubleshooting help seems somewhat hit or miss.

 

[Markess]

In case you didn't know....sometimes...generally....(always?) ipmitool settings won't be persistent. If that's the case for you, once you're happy with a configuration, you'll want to save it as a script to run at startup.

 

[USER189364]

@Markess is this true every time the main restarts? or only when the BMC/Idrac/iLo restarts? I thought that the communication to those is persistent because those are not restarted when the main server is; generally there is a separate restart command for the Out of band?

 

[RedX1]

Hello


IPMItool

Further to the good advice above.


Like some I have found that when installing IPMItool on the more common Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Linux Mint etc.) that the tool will not simply work with a simple installation command such as

sudo apt install ipmitool or sudo apt-get install ipmitool.

Sometimes, IPMItool will not work straight-off, probably because the correct dependencies have not been installed. Finding them is sometimes quite a task.


I have found that the easy way to circumvent this issue is to install several of the different IPMI management tool versions.

On a new installation of Linux Mint or Ubuntu I install all of these versions.

Freeipmi - FreeIPMI - Home

Openipmi - Open IPMI

Ipmiutil - ipmiutil - IPMI Management Utilities

Ipmitool - GitHub - ipmitool/ipmitool: An open-source tool for controlling IPMI-enabled systems

I found that if you install all the versions of the above the correct dependencies will be found and installed and IPMItool will work without issues.


I have not had to do this for some time and these issues may have been fixed, but the above has worked well for me in the past.


A comparison of the features of the various tools can be found here.

Comparison of Linux IPMI Software



I hope this helps.



Take Care



RedX1

 

[Fritz]

Thanks

 

[Markess]

@Markess is this true every time the main restarts? or only when the BMC/Idrac/iLo restarts? I thought that the communication to those is persistent because those are not restarted when the main server is; generally there is a separate restart command for the Out of band?

I honestly have no idea, although now that you mention it, what you say makes sense.

I've had systems that retained settings through warm boot, but not cold, and I had one that never had an issue with system shutdown/restart (although I don't recall when/if I ever rebooted the BMC on that one or if the BMC lost power).

Conversely, I've found several references, including here, that say settings are lost on any reboot, and I've had systems that exhibited that behavior. Which is why I went ahead and put scripts on my machines that I've tinkered with. But, then again, my homelab is a pretty small sample size

 

[Fritz]

Some time ago, don't remember exactly when, I grabbed this from a post here. Don't remember who posted it.

[
For people who want to control fan speed manually here is the ipmi raw command:
ipmitool -I lanplus -H <ipmi ip address> -U admin -P <admin password> raw 0x30 0x39 0x01 0x0 0x0 0x16
Where the second to last number is the fan id. 0x0 is the first fan, 0x3 is the 4th fan etc. The last number is the duty cycle, with 0x64 the full speed.
Unlike supermicro servers, the constant fan speed will stick until power disconnect or bmc reset.
If you use this as a storage server and don't do compute intensive stuffs, it's good enough to quiet the server down.
/QUOTE]