jgreco
Resident Grinch
- Joined
- May 29, 2011
- Messages
- 18,680
You might need to set an IP address in the system BIOS if your network won't DHCP (or you can't figure out where it DHCP'd), but that's really about the extent of visibility to the system. No jumpers (might be one to disable it but what's the point). You'll use a web browser to do all the basic stuff; wait on trying to twiddle anything with ipmitools until you have figured out the BMC webserver.
Now a bit of advice. Spend some time with it PRIOR to installing anything (important) on the system. Go through all the menus and all the features, try them out, play, etc., then reset it all back to defaults at the end. There's no better way to learn the system than to actually use it. When you can boot a DOS floppy disk whose image is uploaded by your PC, and run a Linux livecd whose image is on a Samba server on your network NOT served via your PC, you're probably close to having explored all the nifty save-yer-rear options.
The Supermicro stuff isn't super-polished, certainly not as much as HP's iLO, but it seems approximately just as functional, so you can get a lot of mileage out of it. The thing is, you won't need the stuff 99.9% of the time, but when you can make use of it, you can REALLY make use of it, and that'll be when something else is wrong with your server, so that is absolutely the wrong time to be familiarizing yourself with how to get this stuff to work for you. Do that now and have some fun with it.
I've set up numerous HP servers without touching them except to plug in power and network cables. Most of them have never seen a VGA or PS/2 cable hooked up to them. Frankly, cat5 wiring is easy and fun compared to KVM, and I don't miss it.
