Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 08:25:53 -0600 (MDT) From: Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov> To: Anthony Bourov <abourov@alt.net> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Intel's GX managment port client, or any hints on the specs? Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.20.0004210819000.12518-100000@mini.acl.lanl.gov> In-Reply-To: <4.2.0.58.20000421010847.01c3ae50@mail3.addr.com>
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On Fri, 21 Apr 2000, Anthony Bourov wrote: > We host a whole bunch of servers, all FreeBSD, and many of them run on > intel GX motherboards, which have a feature called EMP. Basically, I didn't > go to much detail into this, I got that it is a way to monitor/control the > server through modem/null-modem client. But they provide their own > client-NT/95 only of course, and it didn't look like the communication is > clear text. Does anyone know if anyone was planning to write something for > this, or if there are specs available. I probably don't need the know > monitoring thing, just a way to do a remote reset. argonne is working on scripts to talk to this. Don't know how far they got. I think EMP is stupid, personally, but worse, it's the usual "this is proprietary" story from Intel. We're doing this: www.linuxbios.org instead. And, oh yeah, with our reset you won't reboot with zero'd memory. You get your syslog back, for example. You could if you wanted get an 'OS core dump' like the good old days. > In general, are there any good remote reset solutions, one that would > invoke a hard reset, but not one of those that will completely cut the > power to the server, and then turn it back on, I found that it's pretty > likely to get problems if you use that enough. Not really at present. Hard to believe but lotsa people still think remote power off is a good reset solution. bleah. ah, just joking, but I was thinking of buying one of these: http://www.draganfly.com/products_4eh.html put a little camera and solenoid on it, then have it fly around and hit reset on our cluster from the convenience of my cube :-) Less joking: buy 128 solenoids, screw them to the front of your nodes, make them remote control, .... voila, remote reset :-) Seriously: get rid of that crummy intel bios and put something in there that will give you some actual capability. Think about it, the L440GX has a 100,000,000 bps network yet uses a 9,600 bps management network. Ridiculous. ron To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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