Get firmware version of IPMI module

Posted on February 9, 2016  •  1 minutes  • 203 words  •  Suggest Changes

I wanted to know the power usage of a server, on newer modules this was on the webinterface; No luck on a bit older machine though.  I try’d to get to upgrade the firmware (oooo-aaaaa watch out when doing this, its dangerous) to get this information. Finding the IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface) device and getting the info can be done like this :

ipmitool bmc info

The ipmitool is in most repo’s, but can be found on sourceforge (its like github but less cool).  If you are against using ipmitools, you can also use this new thing called dmidecode. (its new to me) This will give you the info on IPMI device.

dmidecode --type 38

Info for my device was :

# dmidecode 2.12
SMBIOS 2.6 present.

Handle 0x005E, 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: 0x0000000000000CA2 (I/O)
        Register Spacing: Successive Byte Boundaries

Btw, power usage was not on the newest firmware, I tried calculating back from the UPS, but with 4 $servers and only 2 $servers_known. It was a bit to hard, I just bought a larger extra UPS. (#morepoweralwaysworks)