[172218] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: ipmi access
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Drake)
Wed Jun 4 23:26:05 2014
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2014 23:25:55 -0400
From: Robert Drake <rdrake@direcpath.com>
To: <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <538CB795.80404@gameservers.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
On 6/2/2014 1:42 PM, Brian Rak wrote:
> They do publish it. The problem is, it's not documented, and it takes
> a bunch of work to get into a usable state. See
> ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/GPL/SMT/SDK_SMT_X9_317.tar.gz
>
> Plus, the firmware environment is pretty hostile. If you flash some
> bad firmware, your only option is to desolder the IPMI flash chip and
> program it externally. It cannot be reprogrammed in circuit, and
> there's no recovery method.
There is a market here for first or third parties to make money, or for
open source people to hack a new firmware into existence. Since HP
charges a yearly license fee for their ILO, it should remain secured
until they stop support for that platform.
People would probably revolt if supermicro started charging for
something that has been free though. The ideal situation would be if
they continued to provide what they do for free and upsold some extra
features. Maybe the ability to group manage thousands of boxes, but you
can already pretty much do that with the CLI impi tools.
It's unfortunate that free means complete security nightmare.
