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Enterprise motherboards had IPMI forever. None complained until laymen found out the same thing sits inside -their- computers.
by lowry 9y ago
Enterprise motherboards had IPMI forever. None complained until laymen found out the same thing sits inside -their- computers.
- dsr_ 9y agoIPMI is supposed to be a tiny computer that listens for authorized network requests to turn on the main machine, reboot it, and connect a serial session to the console so you have a hope of recovering access when somebody has screwed up the main networking configuration. Loads of us (sysadmins) complained that IPMI (DRAC, LOM...) had frequent security issues, wasn't running open-source code that we could inspect, and kept growing new features without any sense of responsibility. We were especially irked when a dedicated IPMI ethernet port got shared with a micro switch to a normal system ethernet port, and it was not possible to turn that behavior off. Don't say we didn't complain. Say that we were not successful in having motherboard manufacturers implement the features we want in a secure and controllable manner.