4 ms·

> We've hacked together a Ruby script that retrieves a console screenshot via IPMI and checks the color in the image to determine if we've hit a failure or not.

by alpb 11y ago

> We've hacked together a Ruby script that retrieves a console screenshot via IPMI and checks the color in the image to determine if we've hit a failure or not. That's pretty funny yet sounds a lot familiar to many of us as every now and then we all do these sort of nasty hacks.

markild 11y ago
Also probably a lot better than to make MemTest86 do all sorts of network stuff.
versteegen 11y ago
Yikes, having attended a computer vision conference last week, that sort of apporach is actually starting to sound reasonable and intelligent!
shanselman 11y ago
Ya, I came here to talk about that line as well. The whole article was interesting, but that line stood out as a pretty surprising hack for 2015.
osxrand 11y ago
Hah! I wrote a script a few months back and had to solve an issue of figuring out the state of a program running under wine, and that was my solution (to not in ruby, just a quick bash script). I was pretty happy with the results but if felt like an incredibly crude way to solve the problem, now I read that this is being used at much higher levels than I'll get to, maybe it's not so bad :)
SEJeff 11y ago
Vs just buying opengear console servers and something like conserver to get the actual text via serial like most large Unix environments (every job I've worked at) do. Then you can just scrape the text.
- FireBeyond 11y ago
  Right, this surprised me. They're doing IPMI, so why not SOL (Serial over LAN) to get the raw stream? Actually, on second thoughts, I'm not surprised so much. I've read many threads on Supermicro IPMI and people's frustration with it (reliant on outdated Java, and hacked together wrappers over VNC) that make it seem like a deliberate choice to obfuscate things -just- enough to make other tools difficult.
  - SEJeff 11y ago
    No a career building those types of tools taught me SoL is garbage from most vendors. Cray, Dell, and HP are (arguably) best with mostly reliable SoL, but they still are awful. If you paste a buffer too big into a SoL session, the dell DRAC will freeze, so you have to kill and restart the serial connection. If you have > 1000 machines, hardware serial is the best thing to do for management, in addition to IPMI for power management.

by alpb 11y ago

markild 11y ago

Also probably a lot better than to make MemTest86 do all sorts of network stuff.

versteegen 11y ago

Yikes, having attended a computer vision conference last week, that sort of apporach is actually starting to sound reasonable and intelligent!

shanselman 11y ago

Ya, I came here to talk about that line as well. The whole article was interesting, but that line stood out as a pretty surprising hack for 2015.

osxrand 11y ago

Hah! I wrote a script a few months back and had to solve an issue of figuring out the state of a program running under wine, and that was my solution (to not in ruby, just a quick bash script). I was pretty happy with the results but if felt like an incredibly crude way to solve the problem, now I read that this is being used at much higher levels than I'll get to, maybe it's not so bad :)

SEJeff 11y ago

Vs just buying opengear console servers and something like conserver to get the actual text via serial like most large Unix environments (every job I've worked at) do. Then you can just scrape the text.

FireBeyond 11y ago
Right, this surprised me. They're doing IPMI, so why not SOL (Serial over LAN) to get the raw stream? Actually, on second thoughts, I'm not surprised so much. I've read many threads on Supermicro IPMI and people's frustration with it (reliant on outdated Java, and hacked together wrappers over VNC) that make it seem like a deliberate choice to obfuscate things -just- enough to make other tools difficult.
- SEJeff 11y ago
  No a career building those types of tools taught me SoL is garbage from most vendors. Cray, Dell, and HP are (arguably) best with mostly reliable SoL, but they still are awful. If you paste a buffer too big into a SoL session, the dell DRAC will freeze, so you have to kill and restart the serial connection. If you have > 1000 machines, hardware serial is the best thing to do for management, in addition to IPMI for power management.