freeipmi | cloned from svn at http : //savannah.gnu.org/svn/

IPMI can be used in-band (i.e. running on a machine locally) or out-of-band (i.e. connecting remotely). Most FreeIPMI tools can operate in-band by using one of the in-band drivers included. These in-band drivers include a direct KCS interface driver, a Linux SSIF driver through the SSIF device (i.e. /dev/i2c-0), the OpenIPMI Linux kernel driver (i.e. /dev/ipmi0), and the Sun/Solaris BMC driver (i.e. /dev/bmc). If your system requires the use of installed drivers, those appropriate modules must be installed ahead of time. However, most systems should automatically load these drivers when appropriate. Under most scenarios, the FreeIPMI tools should automatically discover which in-band interface to use and the proper settings to use. Users may execute the tools on the command line to begin using them. Some motherboards may require you to determine driver type, addresses, paths, etc. on your own and pass them as command line options to the tools. You may use ipmi-locate(8) to help determine this information. Other tools such as dmidecode(8) may also provide this information. To use IPMI out-of-band with tools such as ipmipower(8) or ipmi-sensors(8), the remote machine's BMC must first be configured for out of band communication. Typically, this involves setting a username, password, IP address, MAC address, and a few other parameters. This can be done using the tool bmc-config(8). Additional information on how to configure with bmc-config(8) can be found in the bmc-config.conf(5) manpage. Some vendors may pre-configure their motherboards with default values so that bmc-config(8) can be used remotely to configure the machine. However, most of the time, the BMC must be configured in-band before out-of-band access can be allowed (for example, the correct IP address and MAC address must be configured). In order to remotely connect to a machine, you typically must specify the host, username, and password for the tool in order to connect. Depending on configuration settings, a K_g key, privilege level, authentication type, cipher suite id, or protocol version may need to be specified. Some vendors may have not implemented IPMI properly and a workaround must be specified into FreeIPMI to ensure the tool can execute properly. For example, a fair number of vendors have populated their FRU records with invalid checksums. To properly ignore these set of checksums a 'skipchecks' workaround has been added to ipmi-fru(8). Please see each of the tool manpages to see a list of available workarounds. Additional information, examples, and general trouble-shooting can be found in each of the tool manpages.