Hackery

IPMI on CentOS/RHEL

Wed 10 Mar 2010

Spent a few days deep in the bowels of a couple of datacentres last week, and realised I didn't know enough about Dell's DRAC base management controllers to use them properly. In particular, I didn't know how to mess with the drac settings from within the OS. So spent some of today researching that.

Turns out there are a couple of routes to do this. You can use the Dell native tools (e.g. racadm) included in Dell's OMSA product, or you can use vendor-neutral IPMI, which is well-supported by Dell DRACs. I went with the latter as it's more cross-platform, and the tools come native with CentOS, instead of having to setup Dell's OMSA repositories. The Dell-native tools may give you more functionality, but for what I wanted to do IPMI seems to work just fine.

So installation is just:

yum install OpenIPMI OpenIPMI-tools
chkconfig ipmi on
service ipmi start

and then from the local machine you can use ipmitool to access and manipulate all kinds of useful stuff:

# IPMI commands
ipmitool help
man ipmitool

# To check firmware version
ipmitool mc info
# To reset the management controller
ipmitool mc reset [ warm | cold ]

# Show field-replaceable-unit details
ipmitool fru print

# Show sensor output
ipmitool sdr list
ipmitool sdr type list
ipmitool sdr type Temperature
ipmitool sdr type Fan
ipmitool sdr type 'Power Supply'

# Chassis commands
ipmitool chassis status
ipmitool chassis identify [<interval>]   # turn on front panel identify light (default 15s)
ipmitool [chassis] power soft            # initiate a soft-shutdown via acpi
ipmitool [chassis] power cycle           # issue a hard power off, wait 1s, power on
ipmitool [chassis] power off             # issue a hard power off
ipmitool [chassis] power on              # issue a hard power on
ipmitool [chassis] power reset           # issue a hard reset

# Modify boot device for next reboot
ipmitool chassis bootdev pxe
ipmitool chassis bootdev cdrom
ipmitool chassis bootdev bios

# Logging
ipmitool sel info
ipmitool sel list
ipmitool sel elist                       # extended list (see manpage)
ipmitool sel clear

For remote access, you need to setup user and network settings, either at boot time on the DRAC card itself, or from the OS via ipmitool:

# Display/reset password for default root user (userid '2')
ipmitool user list 1
ipmitool user set password 2 <new_password>

# Display/configure lan settings
ipmitool lan print 1
ipmitool lan set 1 ipsrc [ static | dhcp ]
ipmitool lan set 1 ipaddr 192.168.1.101
ipmitool lan set 1 netmask 255.255.255.0
ipmitool lan set 1 defgw ipaddr 192.168.1.254

Once this is configured you should be able to connect using the 'lan' interface to ipmitool, like this:

ipmitool -I lan -U root -H 192.168.1.101 chassis status

which will prompt you for your ipmi root password, or you can do the following:

echo <new_password> > ~/.racpasswd
chmod 600 ~/.racpasswd

and then use that password file instead of manually entering it each time:

ipmitool -I lan -U root -f ~/.racpasswd -H 192.168.1.101 chassis status

I'm using an 'ipmi' alias that looks like this:

alias ipmi='ipmitool -I lan -U root -f ~/.racpasswd -H'

# which then allows you to do the much shorter:
ipmi 192.168.1.101 chassis status
# OR
ipmi <hostname> chassis status

Finally, if you configure serial console redirection in the bios as follows:

Serial Communication -> Serial Communication:       On with Console Redirection via COM2
Serial Communication -> External Serial Connector:  COM2
Serial Communication -> Redirection After Boot:     Disabled

then you can setup standard serial access in grub.conf and inittab on com2/ttyS1 and get serial console access via IPMI serial-over-lan using the 'lanplus' interface:

ipmitool -I lanplus -U root -f ~/.racpasswd -H 192.168.1.101 sol activate

which I typically use via a shell function:

# ipmi serial-over-lan function
isol() {
   if [ -n "$1" ]; then
       ipmitool -I lanplus -U root -f ~/.racpasswd -H $1 sol activate
   else
       echo "usage: sol <sol_ip>"
   fi
}

# used like:
isol 192.168.1.101
isol <hostname>

Mocking RPMs on CentOS

Wed 24 Feb 2010

Tags: centos, linux, rpm.

Mock is a Fedora project that allows you to build RPM packages within a chroot environment, allowing you to build packages for other systems than the one you're running on (e.g. building CentOS 4 32-bit RPMs on a CentOS 5 64-bit host), and ensuring that all the required build dependencies are specified correctly in the RPM spec file.

It's also pretty under-documented, so these are my notes on things I've figured out over the last week setting up a decent mock environment on CentOS 5.

First, I'm using mock 1.0.2 from the EPEL repository, rather than older 0.6.13 available from CentOS Extras. There are apparently backward-compatibility problems with versions of mock > 0.6, but as I'm mostly building C5 packages I decided to go with the newer version. So installation is just:

# Install mock and python-ctypes packages (the latter for better setarch support)
$ sudo yum --enablerepo=epel install mock python-ctypes

# Add yourself to the 'mock' group that will have now been created
$ sudo usermod -G mock gavin

The mock package creates an /etc/mock directory with configs for various OS versions (mostly Fedoras). The first thing you want to tweak there is the site-defaults.cfg file which sets up various defaults for all your builds. Mine now looks like this:

# /etc/mock/site-defaults.cfg

# Set this to true if you've installed python-ctypes
config_opts['internal_setarch'] = True

# Turn off ccache since it was causing errors I haven't bothered debugging
config_opts['plugin_conf']['ccache_enable'] = False

# (Optional) Fake the build hostname to report
config_opts['use_host_resolv'] = False
config_opts['files']['etc/hosts'] = """
127.0.0.1 buildbox.openfusion.com.au nox.openfusion.com.au localhost
"""
config_opts['files']['etc/resolv.conf'] = """
nameserver 127.0.0.1
"""

# Setup various rpm macros to use 
config_opts['macros']['%packager'] = 'Gavin Carr <gavin@openfusion.com.au>'
config_opts['macros']['%debug_package'] = '%{nil}'

You can use the epel-5-{i386,x86_64}.cfg configs as-is if you like; I copied them to centos-5-{i386,x86_64}.cfg versions and removed the epel 'extras', 'testing', and 'local' repositories from the yum.conf section, since I typically want to build using only 'core' and 'update' packages.

You can then run a test by doing:

# e.g. initialise a centos-5-i386 chroot environment
$ CONFIG=centos-5-i386
$ mock -r $CONFIG --init

which will setup an initial chroot environment using the given config. If that seemed to work (you weren't inundated with error messages), you can try a build:

# Rebuild the given source RPM within the chroot environment
# usage: mock -r <mock_config> --rebuild /path/to/SRPM e.g.
$ mock -r $CONFIG --rebuild ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS/clix-0.3.4-1.of.src.rpm

If the build succeeds, it drops your packages into the /var/lib/mock/$CONFIG/result directory:

$ ls -1 /var/lib/mock/$CONFIG/result
build.log
clix-0.3.4-1.of.noarch.rpm
clix-0.3.4-1.of.src.rpm
root.log
state.log

If it fails, you can check mock output, the *.log files above for more info, and/or rerun mock with the -v flag for more verbose messaging.

A couple of final notes:

the chroot environments are cached, but rebuilding them and checking for updates can be pretty network intensive, so you might want to consider setting up a local repository to pull from. mrepo (available from rpmforge) is pretty good for that.
there don't seem to be any hooks in mock to allow you to sign packages you've built, so if you do want signed packages you need to sign them afterwards via a rpm --resign $RPMS.

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