Blog O’ Matty

Using ipmitool to manage the reboot process on Solaris hosts

I’ve talked about ipmitool a couple of times in the past, and have grown to love this super useful tool. My good friend and fellow blogging partner Mike Svoboda mentioned a few weeks back that ipmitool had a bootdev option, which can be used to tell the machine what to do the next time the machine is power cycled. This is useful for booting a pmachine via PXE, telling a machine to go into the bios, booting a machine in safe mode, or booting from an attached cdrom or disk drive. The full list of boot options can be viewed by running ipmitool with the bootdev help option:

$ ipmitool -I bmc chassis bootdev help

bootdev  [clear-cmos=yes|no]
  none  : Do not change boot device order
  pxe   : Force PXE boot
  disk  : Force boot from default Hard-drive
  safe  : Force boot from default Hard-drive, request Safe Mode
  diag  : Force boot from Diagnostic Partition
  cdrom : Force boot from CD/DVD
  bios  : Force boot into BIOS Setup

If you need to boot a machine into the bios, you can specify the bios target:

$ ipmitool -I bmc chassis bootdev bios

To boot a machine via PXE, you can use the pxe option:

$ ipmitool -I bmc chassis bootdev pxe

The pxe option is incredibly powerful, since it provides some nice glue to make lights out automated build systems. This is good stuff, and I need to remember to send Mike some yak (inside joke) for this awesome find! :)