NachoTech Blog

A new feature crept in unannounced in the recent iLO 2 v1.77 firmware update from HP: You can now kill / terminate Virtual Serial Port (VSP) sessions that are open or hung. This is a very useful when you need to connect to the VSP but you (or someone else) is already connected from another location. (The iLO Virtual Serial Port only allows a single connection at any given time.) [Read the rest of this entry...]

If you are using the HP health drivers for ProLiant servers (or at least the hp-wdt driver), any system hangs or panics caused by NMI’s (non-maskable interrupts) will be logged to the IML (Integrated Management Log) and can be viewed using iLO. The IML log is on the System Status page of the iLO web interface.

This is great, but the error messages logged are not very user friendly. NMI’s will be logged as Unrecoverable System Errors something like this:
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You may have noticed something different in HP’s latest ProLiant G6 server announcements. Something called the HP ProLiant Onboard Administrator that doesn’t have anything to do with blades! For example, this page from HP.COM: HP ProLiant Onboard Administrator
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This OA command I recently came across works like magic. If you’ve ever done it manually, you know how time consuming it can be to update the iLO (Integrated Lights Out) firmware across multiple ProLiant servers. However, with the BladeSystem Onboard Administrator, it can be accomplished in seconds using a single CLI command to update the iLO firmware on all the server blades within a c-7000 or c-3000 enclosure. There’s more info after the jump… [Read the rest of this entry...]

Have you ever forgotten an IP address for an iLO on your network? Do you ever wonder “What’s my iLO IP Address?” Maybe you’re using DHCP, and you’ve added a new server to your network, but you don’t know the IP address of its iLO (and you’re not using dynamic dns - so the iLO ‘toe-tag’ name can’t be used as an alias).

Here is a handy script I wrote to search a local network (using nmap) to find all the iLO’s (HP Integrated Lights-Out adapters). It gives you a list of all the iLO’s found, including their firmware version and server hardware type. It’s a good tool to use when a new iLO firmware version comes out and you need to know which servers need to be updated. [Read the rest of this entry...]

I use Stickies on my Mac very often.  I use it as a simple database to track things I need to remember.  Recently I discovered a bug however, and have reported it to Apple (Bug ID # 6331876).  This silent bug was pretty frustrating to me until I realized what was happening.  It’s still frustrating to know that the Find function has this major bug (imho).

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Sometimes you might have a very large file that you want to email or FTP to someone, but your email server limits you to small size attachments. The good news is that this is very easy to do with the tools already on your computer. The bad news is that you may have to learn a little about Terminal and the Bash command line utilities. Remember, learning can keep you young!

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Haven’t you always wanted to configure your blade iLO’s en masse instead of one by one? You can now with the Onboard Administrator’s ‘HPONCFG’ command. Here’s an example of a RIBCL XML script that can be used with the HPONCFG command in the Onboard Administrator (OA) command line interface (CLI). This example script will modify the iLO user account “root” to give it all of the Administrator privileges. [Read the rest of this entry...]

There are a number of steps needed to properly enable a serial console on Linux. You have to make sure that the kernel uses it for logging, make sure a getty runs on it, make sure that kudzu doesn’t mess with your terminal, and finally make sure that root logins are allowed on it. To make these steps simpler, I have written a script to perform all the steps automatically. This script was written and tested on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4) but it could easily be modified for other Linux distributions.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

There are a lot of companies that use serial console servers (e.g. Cyclades) to monitor the serial ports of their servers. These servers are usually running an operating system like Linux or FreeBSD. By accessing the serial console, the administrator can control almost everything on the server, and even watch it boot. This type of server management originated with Unix servers that did not have a video console - just a legacy RS-232 DB9 serial port.

With the advent of blade servers like the HP BladeSystem, the use of serial console servers is no longer necessary. [Read the rest of this entry...]