Configure HP Lights-Out LO100i from the host operating system?

Question

I have a system situated in a co-location facility running Windows Server 2008. The hardware is an HP DL165 G7 and features four NIC interfaces. NIC1 is also a shared management port for the ILO 100i. DHCP is not present on the network (although I can make it available temporarily). Is there any way to configure the Lights-Out 100i from the host operating system like with the preset ILO2 and ILO3's hponcfg utility? I have the 100i advanced key installed and my aim is to get console access to the server.

Answer 1

Caveat: my company sells Proliants, usually DL300 series or bigger, and I have little exposure to the lower end servers. I also do Linux more than Windows, so I don't know how good the Windows IPMI support is.

Lights Out 100i is a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC). It, as Isd said, is not as full-featured or capable a BMC as iLO. That said, HP do claim it supports the industry standard IPMI. IPMI has an interface for allowing user-space tools on the host to query and control the BMC. It is up to the manufacture how much of the IPMI feature set they do or don't implement. I have successfully queried temperature using IPMI over the network to the LO100i of a bunch of older machines (DL145 G3), but I don't think those let me do the same through the IPMI 'host' channel.

I suggest you start by trying ipmiutil and run ipmiutil lan and seeing if there is a supported IPMI 'host' interface to the BMC which lets you at least query the LAN settings of lo100i. In my case LO100i was based on some Qlogic Zircon BMC. It might be different on your generation 7 machines. The Windows equivalent of lspci and dmesg | grep ipmi might provide a useful clue if things are not working.

Answer 2

The LO100i BMC cannot be configured with hponcfg, as you already discovered. But it can be configured using the lo100cfg utility which is available as a part of the SmartStart Scripting Toolkit for every supported platform. The basic syntax:

 lo100cfg -o currentconfig.xml

dumps the current BMC configuration to the currentconfig.xml outfile. Just edit the file (basically IP, Telnet, SSH, HTTP/SSL and firewall configuration - see the user guide for the SmartStart scripting toolkit for details) to your liking and run

 lo100cfg -i currentconfig.xml

afterwards to read and import the new configuration. I was rather surprised to see that, but the scripting toolkit installed and lo100cfg worked flawlessly on Server Core and Hyper-V installations as well.

Answer 3

No, the 100 i only supports IPIMI commands (you can download a tool here: http://www.intel.com/design/servers/ipmi/ipmi_tool.htm ). the 100 series wasn;t designed for lights out deployment (thus the "Easy-access chassis and internal component labels")

Answer 4

I've been looking, and I haven't found anything. I'm thinking that the lo100 series has no scripting capability, as it seems to be for a lower class of servers (the dl100 series rather than the dl300 series). http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/remotemgmt/lightsout100i-advanced/questionsanswers.html Enables remote control of vital system resources over a LAN or over the Internet using a standard web browser or telnet UI

Looks like telnet is available, so you could probably use expect or something to manage automatically.

But again that is only telnetting to the port, if it is already configured. If it isn't configured yet, it wouldn't be accessible by telnet. I'm going to keep looking, but so far it doesn't look like it is possible.

There is also this little bit of information about the 1o100: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/remotemgmt/lightsout100i-advanced/questionsanswers.html