Quick tip for a hump day. Rushing in to check something quickly on the IMPI. Can’t be bothered with the Web interface. Jumping into a CVM CLI only to find out that the ipmitool isn’t working and the error isn’t helpful.

Could not open device at /dev/ipmi0 or /dev/ipmi/0 or /dev/ipmidev/0: No such file or directory
Get Device ID command failed
Unable to open SDR for reading

Good news is the IPMI is most likely fine. Chances are all you need to do is to use a few extra keys as part of the ipmitool command. Remember that for all calls executed from a CMV the ipmitool has to authenticate with the IPMI and the calls are traversing the network technically even if it is only a virtual switch. KB-1345 Using ipmitool on the CVM gives full command syntaxis and is rich with examples. For Dell hardware refer to KB-6007 -ipmi] Could not open device at /dev/ipmi0 on Dell hardware.

If you are a proud owner of AHV host there is an extra option available for you which is to check the ipmitool service status on the host and restart it if needed.

For those of you who read to this point and still feels uncertain about what all this is about, IPMI is a hardware management interface of the host. The best thing is that it is independent of the OS deployed and can be accessed remotely. IMPI allows to monitor hardware state, review hardware logs, manage LAN configuration, IPMI user accounts and privileges, manipulate power state and more.

IPMI is accessible via Web interface which is convenient and useful in many cases. Sometimes, when Web interface is not accessible or is redundant to ipmitools, and an administrator may prefer the ipmitool instead.

More about IMPI:

KB-1091 Common BMC and IPMI Utilities and Examples

KB-1486 BESXi] How to re-configure IPMI using ipmitool

NEXT Security issue on IPMI v 2.0

Setting or changing the IPMI IP address, what are the restrictions?