DTConsole

Background

This page documents how to do management tasks -- like looking at the console, powering machines on and off, etc. -- from your desktop, instead of going into the machine room.

IPMI

IPMI is a "standard" interface that can be used to do remote management tasks. Most of the physical machines in our farm segment our connected to a special IPMI network (which is different from the standard "internet" network). Via this special management network, you can do things like turn the machine off and on, or look at its console in some cases, or read the temperature of the box. If you know the physical machine you want to access, you can find the corresponding IPMI address on this page: NDPF_Node_Functions, in the table called "IPMI dedicated management network". Here is an example: you want to access wn-val-003.farm.nikhef.nl. You can see from that table the following line:

0.20-0.121	 wn-val-(001-102)		 valentine	 LCG2ELPROD

read this as follows: the first field gives the last two parts of the IP address (the first part is 172.20), so wn-val-003 will have IP address 172.20.0.22. The second field gives the IPMI hostname, so this node has hostname "wn-val-003.ipmi.nikhef.nl".

bosui:~> host wn-val-003.ipmi.nikhef.nl
wn-val-003.ipmi.nikhef.nl has address 172.20.0.22

This information can be used as hostname/ip input for the various IPMI client tools.

Important Note: the IPMI network is not accessible from everywhere. From your desktop, you should have the OpenVPN tunnel running, otherwise you won't be able to connect. The IPMI network is not accessible from all nodes in the farm; it does work from e.g. the install server (stal).

Remote Consoles and Switches

The more modern machines in the farm support something called a "KVM console" over IPMI, which means that via a tool like the Supermicro IPMI viewer, one can look at (and type at) the console of a physical machine. However, not all machines in the farm are modern enough to have this feature. So for some machines in the farm, you can use something like IPMIView to do essentially everything you want (the valentine nodes are a good example), while for other machines in the farm, you must do something else. Good examples of the latter are the older Dell machines like the luilaks and bulldozers. If you want to look at the console on these WNs, you have to use the Dell Remote Console switch software. This software only works under Linux and Windows. Mac users can resort to a virtual machine. I believe there are other solutions and they will be documented here if possible.

Command-line operations via ipmitool

There are a lot of commands you can run via ipmitool. One example is to turn the power of a machine off or on. Here is how to turn one on.

 ipmitool -P $P -U root -H wn-lui1-001.ipmi.nikhef.nl chassis power on

will turn on the power for wn-lui1-001. $P is the password and not listed on this page.

Usernames and passwords

There is no standard username for the IPMI interface on our farm.

• for valentine machines, the username is ADMIN
• for luilak machines, the username is root
• for the Dell Remote Console Switches, the username is apparently Admin although as of this writing I have not been able to verify this.

Good luck and happy system management!