IPMI addon board?

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gardar

Member
Nov 15, 2012
45
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Are there any IPMI addon boards available? For a home built machine.

Actually don't need much functionality, just want to be able see what happens at boot and interact if needed. I am thinking about something like a graphics card, but instead of sending the video from vga/dvi it would be sent over ip.

Or is KVM the only option?
 

gardar

Member
Nov 15, 2012
45
27
18
I am just thinking in general, I have few machines that might benefit of this.
It's too bad those supermicro cards are only compatible with supermicro boards, makes them not so different from dell, hp, etc. that all have their own ipmi boards.

I imagine some features like monitoring etc is vendor specific. but I'm surprised there aren't any "ip gpus" I've been doing some googling but so far I've come up empty handed.

However I came across this post which explains how I can get a ssh server running early in the boot process. It might come in handy when having boot problems, but unfortunately won't help me with any grub and POST related issues I might experience.
 

PersonalJ

Member
May 17, 2013
127
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I am just thinking in general, I have few machines that might benefit of this.
It's too bad those supermicro cards are only compatible with supermicro boards, makes them not so different from dell, hp, etc. that all have their own ipmi boards.

I imagine some features like monitoring etc is vendor specific. but I'm surprised there aren't any "ip gpus" I've been doing some googling but so far I've come up empty handed.

However I came across this post which explains how I can get a ssh server running early in the boot process. It might come in handy when having boot problems, but unfortunately won't help me with any grub and POST related issues I might experience.
Your only option that I am aware of in this case is going to be a lantronix spider kvm or some other network kvm switch.
 

katit

Member
Mar 18, 2015
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Going to bring this topic to the top as I'd like to know too. Is anything changed recently?
I guess KVM is good, but power-cycle machine is also very important. I'm thinking about this for my Workstation in office. I use Remote Desktop from home and if I need to reboot it for some reason - it's a problem.
 

Michael Hall

Member
Oct 9, 2015
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I'm designing my own serial-over-LAN and power control boards for a low-power cluster I'm building in an Ikea Helmer drawer unit. The cluster nodes will be powered from a central 12V power supply and PicoPSUs in each node, though, so it wouldn't be directly applicable to mains-powered gear as is. However, the moderately beefy switching transistors could always be swapped for smaller ones to drive relays...
 

gardar

Member
Nov 15, 2012
45
27
18
Wow, been three years since I started this topic.

I've been thinking about possible solutions for this from time to time.
I wonder if a Raspberry Pi could be used to create a cheap alternative to the Lantronix Spider.

Emulating the PS2 and grabbing a serial output from a server or networking gear shouldn't be too hard. Also mounting a iso through the usb could be relatively easy to do.
Grabbing the VGA output and streaming it through the RPI might be a little harder.

Might be a fun project to do. Or maybe such a project exists already?
 

J--

Active Member
Aug 13, 2016
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What's your threshold for wasting time? :)

I know there's a certain "fun" aspect to it, but you could swap motherboards in an hour and be done as well. And you can have your Raspberry Pi do things that there aren't off-the-shelf solutions for.