IPMI / Ohai

Graham_Christensen · September 23, 2013, 2:36pm

Hello everyone,

I maintain a deployment of SuperMicro servers, and Dell servers, as well as a compliment of cloud machines. What I want to accomplish is as follows:

An ohai plugin to determine if IPMI is available. I can do this with dmidecode, which takes about 30 seconds:

sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

SMBIOS 2.6 present.

Handle 0x2600, DMI type 38, 18 bytes
IPMI Device Information
Interface Type: KCS (Keyboard Control Style)
Specification Version: 2.0
I2C Slave Address: 0x10
NV Storage Device: Not Present
Base Address: 0x0000000000000CA8 (I/O)
Register Spacing: 32-bit Boundaries

And the failure mode, takes less than one second:
sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

Unfortunately it takes too long to run on a regular basis. (If anyone has sage wisdom on detecting IPMI in a quicker fashion, it would be appreciated.) Would it be a faux pas to touch a hint file after the first run which indicates it is present? The logic might look like this:

if hint?(‘has_ipmi’)
ipmi true
else if dmidecode --type 38.include? 'IPMI Device Information’
ipmi true
save_hint(‘has_ipmia’)
else
ipmi false
end

Any feedback would be much appreciated!

Thank you very much,
Graham Christensen

BradKnowles · September 23, 2013, 2:42pm

On Sep 23, 2013, at 9:36 AM, Graham Christensen graham@grahamc.com wrote:

Unfortunately it takes too long to run on a regular basis. (If anyone has sage wisdom on detecting IPMI in a quicker fashion, it would be appreciated.) Would it be a faux pas to touch a hint file after the first run which indicates it is present?

Normally, I would recommend storing this information in a node attribute that gets saved back to the server, but I don't think any of those attributes would be available to you during the earliest part of the Chef run -- like when Ohai is trying to discover what's on the machine.

So, failing the node attribute solution, I don't see a better alternative than caching this information in a local hint file on the node.

--
Brad Knowles brad@shub-internet.org
LinkedIn Profile: http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu

Brian_J_Murrell · September 23, 2013, 2:43pm

On 13-09-23 10:36 AM, Graham Christensen wrote:

Hello everyone,

I maintain a deployment of SuperMicro servers, and Dell servers, as well as a compliment of cloud machines. What I want to accomplish is as follows:

An ohai plugin to determine if IPMI is available. I can do this with dmidecode, which takes about 30 seconds:

It only takes less than a second on my hardware:

time dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

SMBIOS entry point at 0x000f0440

SMBIOS 2.6 present.

Handle 0x00AD, DMI type 38, 16 bytes
IPMI Device Information
Interface Type: KCS (Keyboard Control Style)
Specification Version: 2.0
I2C Slave Address: 0x10
NV Storage Device: Not Present
Base Address: 0x0000000000000CA2 (I/O)

real 0m0.002s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.001s

Cheers,
b.

Tim_Green · September 23, 2013, 2:57pm

Another idea would be to set it as a persistent node attribute (node.set), then you can use the attribute? helper method and adopt similar logic that you have below. Now you can keep search and still avoid the overhead of calling dmidecode repeatedly.

On September 23, 2013 at 10:37:23 AM, Graham Christensen (graham@grahamc.com) wrote:

Hello everyone,

I maintain a deployment of SuperMicro servers, and Dell servers, as well as a compliment of cloud machines. What I want to accomplish is as follows:

An ohai plugin to determine if IPMI is available. I can do this with dmidecode, which takes about 30 seconds:

sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

SMBIOS 2.6 present.

Handle 0x2600, DMI type 38, 18 bytes
IPMI Device Information
Interface Type: KCS (Keyboard Control Style)
Specification Version: 2.0
I2C Slave Address: 0x10
NV Storage Device: Not Present
Base Address: 0x0000000000000CA8 (I/O)
Register Spacing: 32-bit Boundaries

And the failure mode, takes less than one second:
sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

Unfortunately it takes too long to run on a regular basis. (If anyone has sage wisdom on detecting IPMI in a quicker fashion, it would be appreciated.) Would it be a faux pas to touch a hint file after the first run which indicates it is present? The logic might look like this:

if hint?(‘has_ipmi’)
ipmi true
else if dmidecode --type 38.include? 'IPMI Device Information’
ipmi true
save_hint(‘has_ipmia’)
else
ipmi false
end

Any feedback would be much appreciated!

Thank you very much,
Graham Christensen

Graham_Christensen · September 23, 2013, 3:08pm

Hrmm… Yes, that would work as well. Originally I was going to implement this as an Ohai plugin which wouldn't have the node.set available to it,but as an early-stage recipe may work just fine. Although, that would mean I couldn't use ohai in system scripts.

If IPMI is not present, it appears it runs in less than half a second, so re-running it repeatedly on a host without it would cause no harm.

--
Graham Christensen
Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)

On Monday, September 23, 2013 at 9:57 AM, Tim Green wrote:

Another idea would be to set it as a persistent node attribute (node.set), then you can use the attribute? helper method and adopt similar logic that you have below. Now you can keep search and still avoid the overhead of calling dmidecode repeatedly.

On September 23, 2013 at 10:37:23 AM, Graham Christensen (graham@grahamc.com (mailto://graham@grahamc.com)) wrote:

Hello everyone,

I maintain a deployment of SuperMicro servers, and Dell servers, as well as a compliment of cloud machines. What I want to accomplish is as follows:

An ohai plugin to determine if IPMI is available. I can do this with dmidecode, which takes about 30 seconds:

sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

SMBIOS 2.6 present.

Handle 0x2600, DMI type 38, 18 bytes
IPMI Device Information
Interface Type: KCS (Keyboard Control Style)
Specification Version: 2.0
I2C Slave Address: 0x10
NV Storage Device: Not Present
Base Address: 0x0000000000000CA8 (I/O)
Register Spacing: 32-bit Boundaries

And the failure mode, takes less than one second:
sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

Unfortunately it takes too long to run on a regular basis. (If anyone has sage wisdom on detecting IPMI in a quicker fashion, it would be appreciated.) Would it be a faux pas to touch a hint file after the first run which indicates it is present? The logic might look like this:

if hint?('has_ipmi')
ipmi true
else if dmidecode --type 38.include? 'IPMI Device Information'
ipmi true
save_hint('has_ipmia')
else
ipmi false
end

Any feedback would be much appreciated!

Thank you very much,
Graham Christensen

Graham_Christensen · September 23, 2013, 3:52pm

Based on this then, I suspect the time this could take is highly variable. Is it bad form to create a hint file from within an ohai plugin? just essentially echo '{"detected": false}' > /etc/chef/ohai/hints/ipmi.json or echo '{"detected": true}' > /etc/chef/ohai/hints/ipmi.json after the first detection?

Thank you,

Graham

--
Graham Christensen
Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)

On Monday, September 23, 2013 at 9:43 AM, Brian J. Murrell wrote:

On 13-09-23 10:36 AM, Graham Christensen wrote:

Hello everyone,

I maintain a deployment of SuperMicro servers, and Dell servers, as well as a compliment of cloud machines. What I want to accomplish is as follows:

An ohai plugin to determine if IPMI is available. I can do this with dmidecode, which takes about 30 seconds:

It only takes less than a second on my hardware:

time dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

SMBIOS entry point at 0x000f0440

SMBIOS 2.6 present.

Handle 0x00AD, DMI type 38, 16 bytes
IPMI Device Information
Interface Type: KCS (Keyboard Control Style)
Specification Version: 2.0
I2C Slave Address: 0x10
NV Storage Device: Not Present
Base Address: 0x0000000000000CA2 (I/O)

real 0m0.002s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.001s

Cheers,
b.

Tim_Smith1 · September 23, 2013, 4:16pm

That seems really odd that it's taking 30 seconds for you. On my Supermicro systems that command takes less than a second. Might be worth seeing if there are any IPMI firmware updates to apply from SM.

Tim Smith - Systems Engineer
m: +1 707.738.8132

On Sep 23, 2013, at 7:36 AM, Graham Christensen graham@grahamc.com wrote:

Hello everyone,

I maintain a deployment of SuperMicro servers, and Dell servers, as well as a compliment of cloud machines. What I want to accomplish is as follows:

An ohai plugin to determine if IPMI is available. I can do this with dmidecode, which takes about 30 seconds:

sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

SMBIOS 2.6 present.

Handle 0x2600, DMI type 38, 18 bytes
IPMI Device Information
Interface Type: KCS (Keyboard Control Style)
Specification Version: 2.0
I2C Slave Address: 0x10
NV Storage Device: Not Present
Base Address: 0x0000000000000CA8 (I/O)
Register Spacing: 32-bit Boundaries

And the failure mode, takes less than one second:
sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

Unfortunately it takes too long to run on a regular basis. (If anyone has sage wisdom on detecting IPMI in a quicker fashion, it would be appreciated.) Would it be a faux pas to touch a hint file after the first run which indicates it is present? The logic might look like this:

if hint?('has_ipmi')
ipmi true
else if dmidecode --type 38.include? 'IPMI Device Information'
ipmi true
save_hint('has_ipmia')
else
ipmi false
end

Any feedback would be much appreciated!

Thank you very much,
Graham Christensen

Graham_Christensen · September 23, 2013, 4:17pm

In this particular case its DRAC on a Dell PowerEdge machine, my dmidecode on the SuperMicro machines, it is fairly quick.

--
Graham Christensen
Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)

On Monday, September 23, 2013 at 11:16 AM, Tim Smith wrote:

That seems really odd that it's taking 30 seconds for you. On my Supermicro systems that command takes less than a second. Might be worth seeing if there are any IPMI firmware updates to apply from SM.
Tim Smith - Systems Engineer
m: +1 707.738.8132

On Sep 23, 2013, at 7:36 AM, Graham Christensen <graham@grahamc.com (mailto:graham@grahamc.com)> wrote:

Hello everyone,

I maintain a deployment of SuperMicro servers, and Dell servers, as well as a compliment of cloud machines. What I want to accomplish is as follows:

An ohai plugin to determine if IPMI is available. I can do this with dmidecode, which takes about 30 seconds:

sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

SMBIOS 2.6 present.

Handle 0x2600, DMI type 38, 18 bytes
IPMI Device Information
Interface Type: KCS (Keyboard Control Style)
Specification Version: 2.0
I2C Slave Address: 0x10
NV Storage Device: Not Present
Base Address: 0x0000000000000CA8 (I/O)
Register Spacing: 32-bit Boundaries

And the failure mode, takes less than one second:
sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

Unfortunately it takes too long to run on a regular basis. (If anyone has sage wisdom on detecting IPMI in a quicker fashion, it would be appreciated.) Would it be a faux pas to touch a hint file after the first run which indicates it is present? The logic might look like this:

if hint?('has_ipmi')
ipmi true
else if dmidecode --type 38.include? 'IPMI Device Information'
ipmi true
save_hint('has_ipmia')
else
ipmi false
end

Any feedback would be much appreciated!

Thank you very much,
Graham Christensen

John_Dewey · September 23, 2013, 7:27pm

Not to mention it appears dmidecode is run via Ohai regardless.

github.com

chef/ohai/blob/d74376a05a3a4f99e0a63d6796fae2d4726e9ba4/lib/ohai/plugins/dmi_common.rb

#
# Author:: Kurt Yoder (ktyopscode@yoderhome.com)
# Copyright:: Copyright (c) 2010 Kurt Yoder
# License:: Apache License, Version 2.0
#
# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
# You may obtain a copy of the License at
# 
#     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
# 
# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
# distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
# limitations under the License.
#

module DMI
  # List of IDs and what they translate to

This file has been truncated. show original

On Monday, September 23, 2013 at 9:16 AM, Tim Smith wrote:

That seems really odd that it's taking 30 seconds for you. On my Supermicro systems that command takes less than a second. Might be worth seeing if there are any IPMI firmware updates to apply from SM.
Tim Smith - Systems Engineer
m: +1 707.738.8132

On Sep 23, 2013, at 7:36 AM, Graham Christensen <graham@grahamc.com (mailto:graham@grahamc.com)> wrote:

Hello everyone,

I maintain a deployment of SuperMicro servers, and Dell servers, as well as a compliment of cloud machines. What I want to accomplish is as follows:

An ohai plugin to determine if IPMI is available. I can do this with dmidecode, which takes about 30 seconds:

sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

SMBIOS 2.6 present.

Handle 0x2600, DMI type 38, 18 bytes
IPMI Device Information
Interface Type: KCS (Keyboard Control Style)
Specification Version: 2.0
I2C Slave Address: 0x10
NV Storage Device: Not Present
Base Address: 0x0000000000000CA8 (I/O)
Register Spacing: 32-bit Boundaries

And the failure mode, takes less than one second:
sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

Unfortunately it takes too long to run on a regular basis. (If anyone has sage wisdom on detecting IPMI in a quicker fashion, it would be appreciated.) Would it be a faux pas to touch a hint file after the first run which indicates it is present? The logic might look like this:

if hint?('has_ipmi')
ipmi true
else if dmidecode --type 38.include? 'IPMI Device Information'
ipmi true
save_hint('has_ipmia')
else
ipmi false
end

Any feedback would be much appreciated!

Thank you very much,
Graham Christensen

Graham_Christensen · September 23, 2013, 7:49pm

I suppose then it doesn't matter! However, the dmi plugin doesn't provide any useful regarding the IPMI device, and a secondary call to dmidecode is necessary, unless it caches it somewhere in memory, and not as a node attribute (I don't see it doing that.)

I appreciate your feedback, that is a good point!

Graham

--
Graham Christensen
Sent with Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)

On Monday, September 23, 2013 at 2:27 PM, John Dewey wrote:

Not to mention it appears dmidecode is run via Ohai regardless.

ohai/lib/ohai/plugins/dmi_common.rb at d74376a05a3a4f99e0a63d6796fae2d4726e9ba4 · chef/ohai · GitHub

On Monday, September 23, 2013 at 9:16 AM, Tim Smith wrote:

That seems really odd that it's taking 30 seconds for you. On my Supermicro systems that command takes less than a second. Might be worth seeing if there are any IPMI firmware updates to apply from SM.
Tim Smith - Systems Engineer
m: +1 707.738.8132

On Sep 23, 2013, at 7:36 AM, Graham Christensen <graham@grahamc.com (mailto:graham@grahamc.com)> wrote:

Hello everyone,

I maintain a deployment of SuperMicro servers, and Dell servers, as well as a compliment of cloud machines. What I want to accomplish is as follows:

An ohai plugin to determine if IPMI is available. I can do this with dmidecode, which takes about 30 seconds:

sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

SMBIOS 2.6 present.

Handle 0x2600, DMI type 38, 18 bytes
IPMI Device Information
Interface Type: KCS (Keyboard Control Style)
Specification Version: 2.0
I2C Slave Address: 0x10
NV Storage Device: Not Present
Base Address: 0x0000000000000CA8 (I/O)
Register Spacing: 32-bit Boundaries

And the failure mode, takes less than one second:
sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

Unfortunately it takes too long to run on a regular basis. (If anyone has sage wisdom on detecting IPMI in a quicker fashion, it would be appreciated.) Would it be a faux pas to touch a hint file after the first run which indicates it is present? The logic might look like this:

if hint?('has_ipmi')
ipmi true
else if dmidecode --type 38.include? 'IPMI Device Information'
ipmi true
save_hint('has_ipmia')
else
ipmi false
end

Any feedback would be much appreciated!

Thank you very much,
Graham Christensen

Jay_Feldblum1 · September 23, 2013, 8:49pm

Graham,

It is perfectly fine to cache the results of slow computations such as IPMI
detection where the results are extremely unlikely to change over the
cache's lifetime. The ohai hints directory is a great place for ohai
plugins to use as a cache. Since this is the non-default course of action,
however, document what is being cached and why so that your successor (or
you in six months) is not surprised.

Cheers,
Jay Feldblum

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 11:52 AM, Graham Christensen graham@grahamc.comwrote:

Based on this then, I suspect the time this could take is highly variable.
Is it bad form to create a hint file from within an ohai plugin? just
essentially echo '{"detected": false}' > /etc/chef/ohai/hints/ipmi.json
or echo '{"detected": true}' > /etc/chef/ohai/hints/ipmi.json after the
first detection?

Thank you,

Graham

--
Graham Christensen
Sent with Sparrow http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig

Bryan_McLellan1 · September 24, 2013, 5:19pm

On Mon, Sep 23, 2013 at 10:36 AM, Graham Christensen graham@grahamc.com wrote:

sudo dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

SMBIOS 2.6 present.

Handle 0x2600, DMI type 38, 18 bytes
IPMI Device Information
Interface Type: KCS (Keyboard Control Style)
Specification Version: 2.0
I2C Slave Address: 0x10
NV Storage Device: Not Present
Base Address: 0x0000000000000CA8 (I/O)
Register Spacing: 32-bit Boundaries

The existing Ohai DMI plugin can capture this. It has a whitelist of
which types to include (OHAI-260 [1]), you'll need to add type 38 to
the whitelist. See here:

https://github.com/opscode/ohai/blob/master/lib/ohai/plugins/dmi_common.rb#L72

It seems like modifying that plugin to take an
Ohai::Config[:dmi][:id_to_capture] option would be nice.

--
Bryan McLellan | opscode | technical program manager, open source
(c) 206.607.7108 | (t) @btmspox | (b) http://blog.loftninjas.org

[1] https://tickets.opscode.com/browse/OHAI-260

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IPMI / Ohai

dmidecode 2.11

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

time dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

SMBIOS entry point at 0x000f0440

dmidecode 2.11

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

dmidecode 2.11

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

time dmidecode --type 38

dmidecode 2.11

SMBIOS entry point at 0x000f0440

dmidecode 2.11

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

dmidecode 2.11

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

dmidecode 2.11

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

dmidecode 2.11

dmidecode 2.11

No SMBIOS nor DMI entry point found, sorry.

dmidecode 2.11

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