Supermicro SYS-5015A-PHF + IPMI 2.0 :-[

mikinho · Sep 12, 2010, 7:24 PM

I recently, 4-5 weeks, upgraded my home router to a Supermicro SYS-5015A-PHF running the latest pfSense 2.0-BETA x86-64 and as a router hardware I'm loving it. Low power, 1U, dual on-board Intel 82574L NICs, …. I'm a big fan of the D510 and D525 for home use, I actually have the same Supermicro board for my home SAN as well.

pfSense was running very well in general but every few days I had an issue where my DHCP lease would expire and I would have a headache getting a new one. I initially thought it was something goofy that Comcast was doing but using my virtual pfSense system didn't have any issues. Well I figured it out today and I haven't felt this stupid in a while.

So late last night I had an issue with an orphan duplicate interface preventing pfSense from starting properly. It was close to 4am and I didn't want to wake my wife to get to the server (wall mounted in the master bedroom closest) so I tried to use IPMI to get console access. No such luck, I couldn't connect to the corresponding IPMI address. I thought "crap", I probably left it on DHCP. I did, so I setup a static address and still couldn't connect. After some more troubleshooting I figured out that I used em0 for the WAN interface which was also the shared NIC for IPMI. And then it hit me how stupid I was, the issue with not being able to get a DHCP lease was that the IPMI was acquiring my single IP address before pfSense could.

Anyways, all is working very well now. pfSense rocks and Supermicro SYS-5015A-PHF is one of my favorite little servers. Hopefully my stupidity helps someone else.

holgerg · Dec 12, 2010, 8:04 PM

Mostly the same here - i've upgrade from a Acrosser AR-B1662 to a Supermicro H8SSL-i board (not the latest one, but works quite nice since a couple of days).
Still the IPMI combined port (used as LAN port does loose it's IPMI connectivity once pfsense booted. When the machine is "powered" down - no problem to access & power on via IPMI, but once Pfsense (FreeBSD) is running the dual-NIC is dead for the IPMI side.

I've found a forum entry from 2006 that there was a driver problem, but that should have been overcome by now… is there a new (known) issue w/ IPMI ?
Any hints or suggestions anybody?

Thanks,
Holger

amrogers3 · Dec 16, 2010, 4:31 AM

@mikinho:

…the issue with not being able to get a DHCP lease was that the IPMI was acquiring my single IP address before pfSense could.

Anyways, all is working very well now. pfSense rocks and Supermicro SYS-5015A-PHF is one of my favorite little servers. Hopefully my stupidity helps someone else.

I have the supermicro X7SPA-HF and love it. I have been trying to figure out why the gateway had two IP address entries for the pfSense box. I read your post and then it hit me, one of the IPs is for the IPMI.

Thanks very much for the post! ;D

By the way, how did you secure IPMI? The IP address for IPMI is located on the same interface as the external (WAN) address. This worries me a little bit. Of course the WAN address is a internet routable address and the IPMI is a internal 172.x.x.x address but still, they are on the same interface.