Getting Sun iLOM information within Linux

At work, I’m starting to implement OCS Inventory NG on our Linux boxes to keep track of hardware. Part of the plan is also that we have a MediaWiki installation for internal documentation, and articles for every host (named as the hostname). I’m going to pull data from OCS into the articles based on hostname (via a PHP include) so the documentation will automatically include up-to-date information on hardware.

Since we’re moving to MySQL-backed DHCP, I decided that it would also be nice to include DHCP information and links to our web tool to edit the host (like setting PXE boot information). This is pretty easy for the ethX interfaces, as OCS collects MAC addresses and I can search our DHCP database for them. However, it isn’t as simple for the iLOM interface, which (obviously) OCS knows nothing about - though it’s arguably one of the most-forgotten things on our machines.

I know that HP Proliant servers have the nice little HP PSP (Proliant Support Pack) that includes tools such as hpasmcli, but Sun doesn’t have anything like that. (We just have one HP box in production right now, but I’ll probably be adding support for it soon).

Enter OpenIPMI. The iLOM has an IPMI interface, and the standard OpenIPMI-tools package in CentOS repositories has the ipmitool required to get the relevant information. A call is pretty simple: ipmitool -l open lan print 1 yields something like:

Set in Progress         : Set Complete
Auth Type Support       : NONE MD2 MD5 PASSWORD
Auth Type Enable        : Callback : MD2 MD5 PASSWORD
                        : User     : MD2 MD5 PASSWORD
                        : Operator : MD2 MD5 PASSWORD
                        : Admin    : MD2 MD5 PASSWORD
                        : OEM      :
IP Address Source       : DHCP Address
IP Address              : 172.16.xxx.xxx
Subnet Mask             : 255.255.255.224
MAC Address             : 00:14:4f:xx:xx:xx
SNMP Community String   : xxxxxx
IP Header               : TTL=0x00 Flags=0x00 Precedence=0x00 TOS=0x00
BMC ARP Control         : ARP Responses Disabled, Gratuitous ARP Disabled
Gratituous ARP Intrvl   : 5.0 seconds
Default Gateway IP      : 172.16.xx.xx
Default Gateway MAC     : 00:00:00:00:00:00
Backup Gateway IP       : 0.0.0.0
Backup Gateway MAC      : 00:00:00:00:00:00
802.1q VLAN ID          : Disabled
802.1q VLAN Priority    : 0
RMCP+ Cipher Suites     : 2,3,0
Cipher Suite Priv Max   : XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
                        :     X=Cipher Suite Unused
                        :     c=CALLBACK
                        :     u=USER
                        :     o=OPERATOR
                        :     a=ADMIN
                        :     O=OEM

Now it’s just a matter of integrating this into ocsinventory-agent, having it run the command if present (and Sun hardware), and parsing the results. Once I have some actual code done, I’ll pass it along.

Many thanks to pseud0 on the Sun forums for answering my question about this.