MAAS doesn't automatically enable IPMI over LAN on UCSC-C240-M4

[Nobuto Murata]

Just as an enhancement request to MAAS, it would be nice if MAAS could talk to BMCs with SSH to enable IPMI protocol. Because some models have IPMI protocol disabled by default, but SSH is enabled by default. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, so it's fair if MAAS says IPMI is a hard prerequisite.

Background:

I saw some server models like Cisco UCSC-C240-M4 series in the field with IPMI is disabled by default. It's not realistic to enable those 10+ servers one by one with Web UI of BMC. I used SSH which is enabled by default with the following snippet.

$ for bmc in $BMC_IP_ADDRESSES; do
    cat <<EOF | ssh \
        -oUserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -oStrictHostKeyChecking=no \
        admin@$bmc

scope ipmi
set enabled yes
commit
exit
exit
EOF

done

Also, most of the servers including Dell had SOL(Serial over LAN) with IPMI disabled. I had to enable it explicitly.

bmc-config -D LAN_2_0 -h $BMC_IP_ADDRESSES \
    -u admin -P --commit \
    -e 'SOL_Conf:Enable_SOL=Yes'

Overall it would be nice if MAAS had this kind of "helper" functions to interact with BMCs. SSH example requires some variations based on BMC vendors, but bmc-config example above could be run unconditionally.

[Nobuto Murata (nobuto)]

Another example is to set UEFI as the default boot mode since some models have BIOS(Legacy) boot mode by default. Plus, boot-order=PXE.

$ for bmc in $BMC_IP_ADDRESSES; do
    cat <<EOF | ssh \
        -oUserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null -oStrictHostKeyChecking=no \
        admin@$bmc

scope bios
set boot-mode Uefi
set boot-order PXE
commit

exit
exit
EOF

done

[Andres Rodriguez (andreserl)]

Hey Nobuto,

Enable IPMI over LAN is not required to be done via SSH. This can be done from the system itself with bmc-config, as that only requires sudo credentials. IN fact [1] was meant to enable IPMI over LAN. My guess is that in the cisco systems it requires something extra.

If you can, can you test in your systems what's needed to enable IPMI over LAN with additional config as [1] and we can include it in MAAS by default.

That said, if you want to make other custom changes you have commissioning scripts for that.

[1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/maas/+bug/1664822

[Adam Collard (adam-collard)]

This bug has not seen any activity in the last 6 months, so it is being automatically closed.

If you are still experiencing this issue, please feel free to re-open.

MAAS Team