I am trying to get access to the IPMI interface that should exist on my old second hand server. The board seems to be a SuperMicro X8DTL-3F board with what seems like some modifications to it by the chassis manufacturer Crystal Rugged.
The board does have a dedicated IPMI LAN socket however when booting in via a CentOS 6 Live CD, I cant seem to access anything using the IPMI tools. Centos complains the devices are not present either (no /dev/ipmi0)
From what I have read flashing the BIOS might be a bad idea and SuperMicro seems to be an hit and miss on the IPMI BIOS option with the X8 line. Or is this just something disabled by Crystal Rugged via firmware/BIOS.
Or am I just looking at a failed hardware component which is why ipmicfg.exe -summary gives an error "Can not find a valid IPMI device" when booted via a FreeDOS usb stick.
Best Answer
If the linux IPMI tools (eg, ipmitool) report an error stating there is no such /dev/ipmi0 device, the problem might simply be that you have not yet loaded the drivers that provide this device. Try running