Emaad
Manzoor

IPMI Management Console

The following page serves as a wiki for my GSoC ‘14 project with the OSU OSL.

  • Code and version history for this page can be found here.
  • You can find my proposal here.
  • Repository for the code under the OSU OSL Github organization. TODO
    • Until we move them under the OSUOSL organization, the repositories will be here: igor-rest-api, igor-cli
  • OSL IPMI test machine. TODO

Current Tasks

  • TODO Get access to an IPMI-enabled machine
    • Hypervisors supporting IPMI? Until I get access to a physical machine, I supposed having a VM on a hypervisor that implements a virtual IPMI interface would be useful, but neither KVM/QEMU or Virtualbox support this.
  • Discuss initial REST API and CLI design, REST service hosting
    • An initial implementation is available here.
  • Implement the login and power REST endpoints and CLI commands TODO
    • An implementation will be available soon here.

Design

The standard CLI for IPMI-enabled machines is ipmitool. Since we expect access from devices that may not have ipmitool available (eg. mobile phones), it makes sense to provide a universal REST API that is served from an OSL machine.

REST API

In the REST paradigm, interactions are with resources via HTTP verbs. In our case, resources could be machines, machine devices/logs exposed by IPMI and users. The verbs are HTTP GET, PUT, POST etc. that define different interactions with these resources.

  • /login/: Accepts a username/password combination, issues an auth token on success. All future IPMI requests reuse this auth token.
  • /power/: Powers on, off or cycle the machine. This wraps the ipmitool power status|on|off|cycle|reset commands.
  • /console/: Returns a persistent connection streaming the output of the SOL console. This wraps the ipmitool sol activate|deactivate commands.
  • /sensors/: Provides sensor readings. This wraps the ipmitool sdr commands.
  • /log/: Returns the sensor event log. This wraps the ipmitool sel commands.

CLI

I plan for the CLI to make calls to the REST API, retreive the JSON response and format the output in a suitable way for the screen. The CLI commands will look like the following:

igor login
igor power -h osl0[1-6] status|on|off|cycle|reset
igor console
igor sensors
igor log