SUMMARY
IPMI - disabling IPMI LAN for DHCP
ISSUE
IPMI - Intelligent Platform Management Interface
Purpose
How to configure and disable IPMI for DHCP on Unitrends Recovery-series Appliances
Applies To
Unitrends Appliances with IPMI-Enabled Motherboards
Symptoms / Description
IPMI is a firmware level interface that allows remote management of a server locally or through a network interface. It has the ability to remotely reboot a frozen server, monitor for hardware failures, and also supports KVM over LAN.
IPMI LAN has been known to create traffic on a clients network with DHCP requests and this could pose a security risk if not properly configured or disabled.
Some Unitrends systems have the first onboard NIC enabled for IPMI LAN with DHCP by default, and some only have the IPMI dedicated NIC enabled for IPMI LAN. The IPMI dedicated NIC comes with a black plastic plug in it.
Resolution
To access BIOS IPMI settings reboot the Unitrends appliance into BIOS and choose Advanced -> IPMI Configuration. Then to disable IPMI from BIOS - set a static IP address of 0.0.0.0
To do this without rebooting, from a putty/ssh shell, you can use ipmiutil.
First make sure that ipmiutil is installed (skip this step if release 7.2.0 or later):
a) install ipmiutil from the repo:
# yum install ipmiutil
b) Or it can also be downloaded from http://ipmiutil.sourceforge.net/FILES/ then installed by doing
# rpm -i ipmiutil*.rpm
Run this command to show the current IPMI LAN configuration:
# ipmiutil lan -c
Run this command to disable IPMI LAN, if desired
# ipmiutil lan -d
See Using IPMI LAN for remote access for more information.Third-Party Sources
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/servers/ipmi/
ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/CDR-0010_2.10_IPMI_Server_Managment/Manuals/Installation_20.pdf
http://ipmiutil.sourceforge.net/docs/UserGuide
NOTES
20200716jmaynard - corrected internal link