Just acquired a new Dell server along with it’s iDRAC 6 lights out management system (LOM). Now I know this LOM supports IPMI version 2 and I know FreeBSD is supports IPMI. I installed ipmitool from the ports collection, but I just could not get this local install of ipmitool to talk to the LOM, nothing nada, zip.
Okay what did I forget …
Load the kernel driver, in my defence it’s not very well advertised in the documentation.
kldload ipmi
And if you want it loaded on reboot remember to add this
ipmi_load="YES"
to your /boot/loader configuration file. You can then do all the clever stuff like:
ipmitool sensor
Obviously accessing your LOM from the server it’s installed in has some rather obvious limitations, but in my case it seems an easy way to get the data from the onboard sensor array which is all I really wanted via ipmi directly.
Originally posted by Eric on his blog