Server BMCs can need to be rebooted every so often

Re:Server BMCs can need to be rebooted every so often by aetimmes on Sunday January 15, 2023 @08:05AM (#34389104)

Anecdote, but: I've seen a previous employer blackball a hardware vendor because of terrible BMC support.

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Re:Server BMCs can need to be rebooted every so often by andrewjf on Sunday January 15, 2023 @12:50PM (#34391324)

I've personally been involved in decisions like that, as well. If you're throwing stuff into a datacenter and the BMC doesn't work right[1], the hardware is basically a brick. Vendors should be blackballed for their incompetence.

[1]: all things i have personal experience with:

- chassis bootdev pxe => doesn't do that, just reboots to normal OS

- chassis power off => doesn't do it (oh, here's an ipmi raw command you can use for this BMC version. NO!)

- dhcp server sends an option in an offer it doesn't understand, drops the offer, no IP at all.

- gets scanned by auditor-checkbox-as-a-service (qualys), locks up and sends the host CPU into 100% and locks up that up too.

- Not supporting IPv6 properly (if there's a place to start deploying IPv6 it's BMCs), i.e. uses SLAAC properly, but doesn't use the gateway from the RA so you actually can't use it from outside it's own segment - needs a firmware update to fix but uhh, we didn't dual-stack the BMC network because the whole point is to get that IP space back.

We had to write a test suite for vendors to run against their BMC and validate these things and you were disqualified if you failed.

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