In this post I will be showing you some of the useful IPMI commands which can be used to remotely interact with your servers for things such as power cycles, serial over lan, and more. This guide will assume that your server is already setup and capable of receiving IPMI commands. Please refer https://github.com/ipmitool/ipmitool
Server Power Management
The following ipmitool commands can be used to check power status, turn the power on/off for your server remotely, power cycle it (gracefully if possible), and reset (reset as if you unplugged/plugged the server back in).
ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P chassis power status ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P chassis power on ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P chassis power off ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P chassis power cycle ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P chassis power reset
On a side note, you can also see if somebody rebooted your server using this:
ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P chassis restart_cause
Server Sensor Values
With the commands below you can check on the servers sensors. This includes things such as wattage, temperatures, etc. It will even tell you (usually) if one of those values is past the safe threshold by marking it as critical (cr).
ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P sensor list ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P sdr
Force Server Boot Into BIOS/PXE
The next ipmitool commands can be used to force your server to boot into PXE or BIOS during next reboot, this does NOT work on HP Proliant servers! For that you will need to use different commands. After running these commands you will still need to reboot or power cycle your server for it to actually boot into the desired target.
ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P chassis bootdev bios ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P chassis bootparam set bootflag force_bios; ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P chassis bootdev pxe ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P chassis bootparam set bootflag force_pxe
Check Server SEL Log
You can use the following command to check the SEL on your server, this may include errors such as memory issues or other hardware problems that your server may be experiencing.
ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P sel elist
SOL Session
If you need to then you can connect to your server with a SOL session (serial over lan), this will let you get into your server even if SSH isn’t working. It is basically the same as plugging in a monitor and keyboard. You can do this with the ipmitool commands below.
ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P sol activate
If somebody else is already connected and you would like to boot them off, you can also use the following to terminate their session.
ipmitool -I lanplus -H -U -P sol deactivate
I hope you enjoyed this guide on using the ipmitool, please don’t forget to comment/share. Thanks!
