DevChannel.org: IPMI–What Is It and Why Are There No IPMI Tools for Linux?

[ Thanks to George George for this
link. ]

“Hey, did you know there are all these cool features on most
modern server motherboards that nobody uses? Lots of interesting
stuff like remote power control without any extra hardware
requirements. Most of them have been around on high end server
motherboards for two or three years but there are still little or
no Linux/FreeBSD/Unix tools to access them even now. This article
will attempt to provide a general overview of what the IPMI
standard is and then talk about the current state of IPMI capable
tools for Linux/FreeBSD/Unix.

“IPMI as a standard is not new. It has been around since early
1998. Industry promoters included Intel, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, and
Dell. Since then various companies have become adopters in order to
implement the standard in their hardware. One of it’s main goals
was to enable cross platform server management by standardizing
common abstraction layers above hardware management interfaces. The
IPMI specification defined an abstracted message-based way to
interface to platform management hardware as well as agreeing on a
way to describe platform management devices and the services
associated with them…”

Complete Story