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! :)