ISSUE
Purpose
Discuss IPMI LAN DHCP configuration
Applies To
Most appliances Recovery-??2 and Recovery-??3
Symptoms / Description
You may see DHCP request traffic coming from the MAC address of the backup appliance even though you have set the IP address for the eth0 interface to a static IP address.
Cause
The motherboard has an onboard IPMI LAN channel that shares the eth0. This is why it has the same MAC address. On newer systems the onboard IPMI LAN channel is disabled by default, but on some systems the onboard IPMI LAN channel is enabled with DHCP by default.
Resolution / Workaround / Execution Process
You may reconfigure IPMI LAN to use a static IP address or disable IPMI LAN, by either going into BIOS or by using ipmiutil.
The Supermicro firmware exposes an IPMI LAN interface which is often set to be shared over NIC eth0. This feature can use DHCP to get an address. The address may be set to static in the BIOS screens, or with ipmiutil.
To do this without rebooting, you can use ipmiutil:
Install it by doing 'yum install ipmiutil' or
by downloading it from http://ipmiutil.sourceforge.net/
and installing it with 'rpm -i ipmiutil*.rpm', then
Then run this command to disable IPMI LAN 'ipmiutil lan -d' or
this command to set an IP address of 192.168.2.2 'ipmiutil lan -e -I 192.168.2.2'.
You may also find online the utility called Supermicro IPMIView. This may be used to power the machine on or off remotely and view the console via Java based console. The web interface may also be used to accomplish the same goals.
Third-Party Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Platform_Management_Interface