SuperMicro BMC unresponsive after shutdown?

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altano

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Sep 3, 2011
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Has anyone had their SuperMicro BMC go unresponsive after graceful shutdown of the host? I saw a server fault post suggesting that this can happen if the bmc NIC stops advertising it’s MAC but I manually associated the IP to the MAC in my devices arp address table and that didn’t help.

FWIW I have the bmc set to “dedicated” LAN and I’m directly plugged into the bmc nic.
 

i386

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The only times where the bmc/ipmi stopped working for me was when something was wrong with the bios and the system couldn't post and initialize the onboard devices (including the bmc, had this recently with my m12swa workstation)
 

RolloZ170

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Apr 24, 2016
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Has anyone had their SuperMicro BMC go unresponsive after graceful shutdown of the host?
what happens if you plug the PSU in ? standby power amkes the BMC alive and the after a short time the heartbeat LED starts to flash every second.
if you do not have heartbeat LED after shutdown your PSUs standyb power is to weak or off for some reason.
 

RolloZ170

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@altano would help to know what system.
for older systems there are chipset settings in the BIOS to hold the LAN port alive in standby.
 

altano

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The heartbeat LED is on the motherboard and I couldn't easily crack open the chassis, so I don't know if it was on. I tried everything I could think of like unplugging and plugging back in the ethernet cable. I booted the server and shut it back down. I tried a different network switch and nothing.

Finally, I unplugged the power (on both PSUs) for ~5 seconds. When plugged back in, the BMC came right back up.

Very disturbing. I don't know what to make of that.
 
Last edited:

zac1

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Oct 1, 2022
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we have seen BMC stops working after OS boot starts: driver incompatibility issue.
what OS do you run ?
I was thinking the same thing, but this is _after_ graceful shutdown. Thinking something in the OS shutdown process is killing BMC? Maybe that could be ruled out by live-booting some standard Linux dist and issuing a graceful shutdown?
 

altano

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I’m on Debian Linux (Proxmox). I just realized that the host itself might not be coming up cleanly either until I hard power reset, so something else may be at play.

I’m going to grab a monitor so I can diagnose this further. Will report back in a few weeks.

thanks for taking a look and brainstorming with me, everyone.
 
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altano

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I wanted to get my system back up and diagnose the problem later so I swapped this motherboard (X10SDV-2C-7TP4F) out for another one I had laying around (X10SDV-7TP4F) and I hit the issue again with the new board's BMC being unresponsive.

I hooked a monitor up to see what the issue is and it looks like in both cases the system was failing to boot and was stuck at a failed boot screen. Here's the X10SDV-7TP4F:1677477696888.png

Why would failing to boot make the BMC unresponsive on two boards? I must be missing something?

One thing I should note: I have changed the IPMI networking so that the NIC is set to "Dedicate" and NOT "Share" or "Failover" (the default). Could that be related?
 

altano

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I left the monitor plugged in and restarted and it stays at "IPMI Initialization" for a very long time before getting to this screen.

I'm assuming this is some kind of hardware failure but I literally swapped the whole motherboard (and RAM) so I'm not sure what else could be causing these symptoms.
 

altano

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Anddddd if I keep pressing "DEL" to get into the bios during boot up, instead of getting the boot error above I get a black screen with an "A9" in the corner.

If not the motherboard, then what? Could the chassis itself be cursed?
 

i386

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What's the boot device? Is it by any chance a m.2 ssd?
Can you boot a live system via usb stick/dvd etc?

If not the motherboard, then what? Could the chassis itself be cursed?
That's possible :D
Try another chassis or put on a workbench