SuperMicro IPMI Shared Port - Anyone ever had issues?
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I'm working with a SuperMicro X7SPE-HF-D525 and this motherboard has an integrated Intel Atom D525 dual core (4 threads), and 2 onboard Intel 82574L gigabit network interfaces (em driver). One of these interfaces has Shared IPMI, so as I'm sure many of you know, it has a hardware bridge inside that allows the BMC (Baseboard Management Controller/IPMI) to have one MAC address, and the network interface itself to have the other MAC address.
**What I'm wondering is, assuming that:
•pfSense is configured on this box correctly, and is up to date
•the WAN interface is the port without IPMI
•the LAN interface is the shared IPMI port
•VLAN's are configured correctly on the LAN interface and the IPMI interface is either configured correctly or the BMC disabled altogether
•the BIOS and BMC firmware are up to dateshould there be any noticeable performance decrease or network/packet delays because of the LAN port having 2 MAC addresses because of shared BMC/IPMI also being on that port (either enabled, or disabled via the BMC jumper on the board)? Or should this just work perfectly as if there was no IPMI on the system at all, and the fact that there's a hardware bridge on this interface shouldn't matter?**
I'm NOT doing things like remotely loading system images or ISO's to the unit via IPMI, which would obviously saturate the bandwidth throughput on the port. If anything, I'm just logging into the web interface and viewing statistics and temperatures, and in fact, I currently have IPMI disabled on the BMC jumper on the motherboard.
Some background: I originally had the IPMI interface on the WAN back when I first obtained this system and set it up with pfSense (not knowing it even had IPMI; I assigned the interfaces without knowing which was which and IPMI happened to be default enabled on WAN, obviously not a good idea but I had no idea). After a period of time, sometimes 4 days, sometimes 18 days, the internet would grind to a halt. I could reach the pfSense web interface just fine and it was quick, I could ping pfSense just fine from a LAN client and that was quick, but pinging something like Google that normally takes about 11ms, would take 150ms, with a high percentage of packet loss. I actually called my ISP at one point when this first happened because I thought it was for sure a problem on their end, but the support rep said he had a nice, fast, clean signal to my modem.
Restarting pfsense would NOT fix the problem. Shutting down pfSense, leaving the system for a few minutes, and powering back up, would NOT fix the problem. Powercycling the modem connected to the pfSense WAN would NOT fix the problem.
What DID fix the problem, was a complete power cycle of the SuperMicro board (shutting down pfSense, unplugging AC power, leaving it for a few moments, and plugging back in), which as I now realize, is the only way to restart BMC/IPMI because it's always on when the board has power. This fixed the problem every time. I never figured out exactly why this happened or what caused it.
Since having IPMI on the LAN, this hasn't happened since. But I'm still very curious about potential performance problems of the BMC/IPMI being on the LAN shared port, even with the BMC itself disabled altogether via the motherboard jumper.
Thanks!
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can you describe me your configuration a little bit more? VLANs etc?
I have problem with shared IPMI.
I have LAGG LACP configured with 4 interfaces. One of them is IPMI.
LAN VLANs are 10,11,12,20 etc.
WAN VLAN is 8.
IPMI VLAN is 20.So I configured in IPMI settings - VLAN 20 with DHCP
Ports in the switch are configured as LAGG. All VLANs are set up as Trunk (10T, 20T).
In theory, IPMI should have port configured as access 20UP, but in my case, port is configured as LAGG and it has VLAN 20 set up as Trunk. Switch (cisco) doesn't allow me to setup VLAN 20 as Access and Trunk.
I'm little bit confused how to configure that properly. Maybe you can help me out. I know that there are some type of ports like general, but I am not familiar with that…