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Asked: 2011-12-14 12:19:47 +0800 CST

How can I find out if my server has IPMI of some sort?

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I've never seen a Linux server I admin. How can I find out if it has IPMI of some sort installed?

I tried answering my own question by installing ipmitool:

Setting up ipmitool (1.8.9-2) ...
Starting IPMI event daemon ipmievdipmievd: using pidfile /var/run/ipmievd.pid0
Could not open device at /dev/ipmi0 or /dev/ipmi/0 or /dev/ipmidev/0: No such  file or directory
Unable to open interface
failed!
invoke-rc.d: initscript ipmievd, action "start" failed.

was the answer. Can I find out what the ISP uses to remote-control the server or how the ISP probably hooked it into their remote-management HTML panel?

linux debian ipmi ipmitool

2 Answers

  1. From FreeIPMI's FAQ section: 7. Does my system support IPMI?.

    Does my system support IPMI?

    Unfortunately, there are no universally defined mechanisms for determining if a system supports IPMI via Inband communication. Assuming IPMI is set up correctly for over LAN communication, a fairly reliable mechanism exists out-of-band. Here are some suggestions.

    1. FreeIPMI’s ipmi-locate can be used to determine if IPMI can be found on your system. Users are cautioned though, the failure to discover IPMI via ipmi-locate is not sufficient to disprove that IPMI exists on your system. Your system may not publish such information or may expect clients to communicate at default locations.

    2. dmidecode may be similarly used to probe for devices that support IPMI on your system. You may grep for IPMI or specify the IPMI DMI type on the command line.

       # > dmidecode --type 38
 # dmidecode 2.10 SMBIOS 2.5 present.

 Handle 0x0049, DMI type 38, 18 bytes IPMI Device Information
         Interface Type: KCS (Keyboard Control Style)
         Specification Version: 2.0
         I2C Slave Address: 0x10
         NV Storage Device: Not Present
         Base Address: 0x0000000000000CA2 (I/O)
         Register Spacing: Successive Byte Boundaries

    3. FreeIPMI’s ipmi-ping can be used to see if a machine has an IPMI service at a specific host/IP address. For more wide scale IPMI discovery, the ipmi-detectd daemon and ipmi-detect tool can be used.

    Again, the failure to find an IPMI supported device is not sufficient to show lack of IPMI support.

    Ultimately, some amount of information from product documents or trial and error may be necessary to determine if IPMI is supported on your system.

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  2. Best Answer

    If it's Red Hat, just do rpm -qa|grep ipmi. OpenIPMI would be the most likely install, or one of the proprietary ones (like hpIPMI). There should be an equivalent command on .deb systems and Solaris boxes as well.

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