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IPMC

Image CERN IPMC
Figure 1: shows the CERN IPMC board.

An IPMC board like the CERN IPMC board has to be installed on every ATCA blade:

  • The IPMC is responsible for powering up and down the ATCA board. The board is using dedicated power lines and enables / disables 'payload' power for the rest of the board
  • The IPMC is monitoring the ATCA board by reading out sensors on the board and forwarding the data to the shelf manager
  • For the communication with the IPMC board the shelf manager uses dedicated IPMB lines. The CERN IPMC can also be connected to an ethernet network. Both paths use IPMI for the communication.

How to flash new firmware

Requirements:

a Linux PC with

  • ipmitool installed
  • a network connection to either the shelf manager or the IPMC board directly
  • a ipmc-firmware img file to be flashed to the IPMC (download from here)

Upgrading the IPMC firmware is done via two ipmitool commands.

For all ipmitool commands there are two ways to reach the IPMC:

  1. via the shelf manager:

    • you have to know the ip address of the shelf manager
    • you have to know the IPMB address of the board within the ATCA crate

  2. via an ethernet connection directly to the IPMC board

    • you have to know the ip address of the IPMC board itself

Let's start with option 1:

<shelfmanager> : ip address of the shelf manager

<ipmc_ipmb> : IPMB address of the blade see here in format 0x..

ipmitool -I lan -H <shelfmanager> -U "" -P "" -t <ipmc_ipmb> hpm upgrade ipmc-firmware.img force

ipmitool -I lan -H <shelfmanager> -U "" -P "" -t <ipmc_ipmb> hpm activate

Option 2:

<ipmc> : ip address of the IPMC

ipmitool -I lan -H <ipmc> -U "" -P "" hpm upgrade ipmc-firmware.img force

ipmitool -I lan -H <ipmc> -U "" -P "" hpm activate

Useful ipmitool commands

Again you either have to know the ip address of the IPMC board itself or the ip address of the shelf manager and the IPMB address of the board. The exampes below are given for a board in the central hub slot# 1 and an ip address of the shelf manager 192.168.0.2

  • get board type and firmware version:

    ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.0.2 -U "" -P "" -t 0x82 fru

  • get all the current sensor values:

    ipmitool -I lanplus -H 192.168.0.2 -U "" -P "" -t 0x82 sensor

  • reboot of the IPMC = reboot of the whole ATCA board:

    ipmitool -I lan -H 192.168.0.2 -U "" -P "" -t 0x94 mc reset cold