Asrock E3C224DI-14S IPMI not reachable

Storage Server: Documentation missing

There's definately some documentation missing on the IPMI settings. I managed to lock myself out of the IPMI (also know as 'Integrated Light Out', or ILO) management interface. Not sure how I managed to do that, but in the quest to find out how to restore devine powers, I noticed quite a lot of people suffered from this. And, the solution is quite simple, when you know it. As usual...

Two configurations

The cause of error probably was me updating the network configuration, using the dashboard, instead of using the BIOS update.

IPMI configuration at BIOS
Please note, in the BIOS, you have eth0 and eth1. Eth0 usually is the first interface, so when you assume this would be the IPMI interface, you assumed as I.

Link to Network configuration on the dashboard

Which is completely and utterly wrong... Eth1, which has the label IPMI for a reason, is the correct one, and is found as Port 8 (above the 2 USB ports).

what's with the eth0/eth1, then?

It turns out there's a nifty, quite undocumented feature, of IPMI fallback. the BIOS eth0/NCSI item can be used as IPMI fallback - in case eth1 is not connected... I found this because after the lock out, I could actually use the IPMI when all cables were plugged in. The NCSI port is port 6, or LAN1 (designated as such in the manual), or eth0 (as seen in the BIOS BMC configuration). For completeness sake, LAN2 is not mentioned in the BIOS, only in the Megarac SP configuration (and hard to find).

My recommendation

Stay away from the megarac SP network configration items. Use the BIOS, which takes precedence over the Mearace SP settings anyway, only, and only configure IPMI/eth1 for a fixed ip-adddress. You can always use arp -a to find out the DCHP-assigned ip address to the other interfaces. You can find the MAC-addresses of your LAN1 and LAN2 interfaces at the BMC configuration section of the BIOS, under BMC MAC Restore Tool:

Hope this helps anyone.