Supermicro IPMI not pinging, unable to access

[|-Goku-|]

Hey Everyone,
Hopefully someone has seen this before. I purchased a SM X9DRI-F motherboard which has a dedicated IPMI port. I cannot seem to get the IPMI to work properly. When I plug a cable into the Dedicated Port and LAN1, and power the machine on, sometimes the BIOS will show the IPMI with no IP, no MASK, No Gateway, and all Zeros for the MAC. If I reboot, sometimes it will get a MAC, and it will say that it is in Failover, but I still cannot ping it.

I've used the IPMICFG tool to fd/fde/fdl reset it. I also upgraded from a 2.15 Firmware to the latest 3.48 Firmware(BIOS is also updated to the latest). Sometimes when it is in Failover mode, it will ping for 2 seconds and then stop. The IPMI port shows a blinking green LED which means the heartbeat is good. I was able to get it pinging when I had Windows Installed, and manually changed the type to a Shared LAN through a RAW command. But as soon as I booted up ESXi, it stopped pinging.

I'm not sure what to do, and what to try, and I will take any suggestions.

Thanks!

 

[pricklypunter]

IPMI should be responsive no matter what OS you plan on using. It can take a wee while for the BMC to boot and configure itself etc before it's ready to work though, it's not instant. Try simply providing power, don't switch the server on, just leave it for alone for 5 mins, then try IPMI to see if it's working. If it is, you should then be able to boot, run iKVM, install ESXi etc

 

[Rand__]

Not sure how it is on X9 boards but newer ones can config the BMC/IPMI address in the bios ...

 

[IronForge]

I have that same motherboard model, just got it and configured it about 2 weeks ago.

1. Mine was a used board and didn't have the default IPMI password. I had to boot from USB stick, run IPMICFG tool to reset to default.
2. Check your DHCP server, your IPMI should be picking up a DHCP address from it, unless you set it to static IP.
3. Download and run IPMI View. Supermicro IPMI Utilities | Supermicro Server Management Utilities | Products - Super Micro Computer, Inc.
4. Make sure your IPMI and workstation are on same network so they can communicate together.

You can connect to IPMI even when the motherboard is powered off. It's nice to be able to power the server up remotely via IPMI, and configure the BIOS via KVM. You don't need OS or even hard drive installed to access IPMI.

 

[BLinux]

@|-Goku-| normally, the first thing I would do is the ipmicfg -fd/fdl/fde and usually the -fde. But since you've already tried that, i can only imagine 2 other possible scenarios:

1) Check the CMOS battery's voltage. I've seen old CMOS batteries with a very low voltage cause all sorts of strange symptoms that are not always obvious.
2) Your IPMI is simply broken. I have a similar board, X9DRi-LN4F+, and everything you've described should not be happening. When I've seen similar symptoms, the remedy was usually the ipmicfg -fde. Maybe try it one more time?
3) another remote possibility to check: is the ethernet cable to the IPMI port working reliably? just last week, I was working on a system and used some cheap cable that came with a WiFi camera and my network port kept dropping out and losing link every few minutes. Finally realized every time I moved the cable it caused instability and replaced the cable and the problem was gone.