
Opening Up the Baseboard Management Controller - yarapavan
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3378404
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tenebrisalietum
> If the CPU is the brain of the board, the BMC is the brain stem.

No, that's the chipset and/or I/O buses. BMC is like a biometric remote-
accessible monitor forcefully implanted in your body.

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gautamcgoel
Does anyone know what firmware is on the Raptor Blackbird/Talos boards?

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kop316
[https://git.raptorcs.com/git/](https://git.raptorcs.com/git/)

It looks to be openBMC

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ipmifatwa
Open up your computer, pull out the bmc, throw it in the garbage. If you are
reliant on these things then you are still in a pet-computer world and you’ll
benefit greatly by moving to the cattle model. This article has a section on
why you need a bmc but doesn’t succeed in advocating for it. It’s another
computer inside your main computer with its own set of flaws, bugs, and costs.

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bradfitz
Actually, a good BMC lets you automate your fleet of machines and treat them
like cattle, rebooting/reimaging on demand.

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ipmifatwa
Cattle is when you DGAF that 1% of your machines failed to reboot. A tech can
deal with it whenever.

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MoosePirate
How are you rebooting your cattle though if not via the BMC?

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tedivm
I'm also curious how they're reimaging those machines.

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ipmifatwa
What's wrong with PXE boot?

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AdamJacobMuller
How are you triggering the machine to PXE boot? How are you recovering from
situations where the machine becomes unresponsive or needs someone to look at
a console to see why a failure occurred?

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ipmifatwa
PXE boot it every single time and if it fails it goes on the repair list and
some tech looks at it within 90 days and I DGAF about one dead cow.

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MoosePirate
IPMI is bad. No argument.

Having the ability to remotely reboot servers is good, even in a “cattle”
environment. Being able to pull temperature sensor data from servers is useful
in a data center environment. Having an out of band console available can be
helpful during incidents and outages, or with remote sites where there’s no
tech that will be there. BMCs are useful in a large scale environment.

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AdamJacobMuller
IPMI is the least bad solution to a problem. If someone came up with a better
solution I'd be all over it.

