This is bad I think......exactly how screwd am I ?

[Ceetan]

Ok, so due to have some issues (discussed here ) I recently updated BIOS and IPMI-firmware. Bios went smothly ater a corrected hickup. I then proceedd to update the BMC firmware, ant that seemed to work fine too. Along with everything else. I Created my old IPMI bu change the deafault admin password, the Anonymos account, and also my standard ipmi user, to passwords I had i my Passwoed manager. However , the fans started cycling wierdly, but I saw that when I setup my server, before I hade fan threshholds in place, and as I didn't preserve BMC confguartions over the update, I thought nothing of it. I hade not backed up my fan thresholds, so in order noth to have the eat my dinner to the "wonderful" noise of cycling fans, I powered it down via IPMI, and went to eat. Here is when the trouble strarted. I booted the thing up, and the BMC seems to be working, but I can not log in (at least it seems to be there). Shares and webGUI see to be inacessible, so the server might not be booting properly, even though I get the boot beep.

So, simply put: How screwed am I? My next actions is probably to get a vga Cable, so that O can actually hook up a screen and get some output to share with you all, but untill then, any idea what this might be or what i can do?

 

[joeschmuck]

Get the screen cable. You have no idea what is going on for certain until then.

 

[danb35]

My next actions is probably to get a vga Cable, so that O can actually hook up a screen and get some output to share with you all,

You could always use the KVM over IP that IPMI provides.

 

[joeschmuck]

You could always use the KVM over IP that IPMI provides.

He can't becasue he doesn't know his admin password, well that is what I think he said. Maybe not?

 

[Ceetan]

He can't becasue he doesn't know his admin password, well that is what I think he said. Maybe not?

Esentialtilly yes. I have resolved the issue as such. But what I have noticed that any password larger then 8 chars leads to a failure of login. That seems to have been the root cause.

 

[joeschmuck]

Hum, I didn't know there was a character limit on the password but nothing surprises me these days.

 

[Ericloewe]

Supermicro boards with ASpeed BMCs have something like a 19-character limit that is poorly-documented. And poorly validated by the various fields...

 

[joeschmuck]

19 character sounds reasonable, not being well documented sucks. Myself, I assume 8 character limit unless I know otherwise for home electronics.

 

[jgreco]

Hum, I didn't know there was a character limit on the password but nothing surprises me these days.

This is the problem with integrating stuff like this. Some contractor somewhere wrote this for some hardware subsystem vendor's stuff, which then got hacked on and integrated into Supermicro's stuff, and throughout the chain of things, no one party really understands the whole picture.

Even the seemingly simple stuff is frustrating. I asked Supermicro once about a silent install option for IPMIview, because in a service provider or corporate environment you are often doing automated deployment, and the response I got back seemed to indicate a total lack of insight into how people actually use the product. :-/