HP Management Base Installation and User's Guide (May 2006)

A Frequently Asked Questions
This section addresses frequently asked questions concerning hpmgmtbase.
1. I have a custom kernel, and none of the IPMI modules work.
See Chapter 5.
2. Can I use the Open IPMI driver directly from my own programs?
Yes. There are several open source tools that use direct access to the Open IPMI driver device interface.
One of these is the Open IPMI Library, which can be found at http://www.sf.net/projects/openipmi.
hpmgmtbase sets up the same default devices files used by this library.
Another utility is ipmitool which also uses those default device files.
Multiple programs can access the device files simultaneously. While HP expects that to be reasonable
activity, HP does not support the use of any but HP-supplied commands with the HP-supplied binaries.
3. Does Open HPI work on HP Integrity Servers?
No. The Open HPI implementation relies on few optional IPMI commands that are not currently realized
on HP Integrity Servers.
4. What about Free IPMI?
Free IPMI is a user-space protocol driver that gives access to BMC hardware without a kernel module.
It is targetted specifically at I/O port implementations of BMCs found on x86 architectures. HP Integrity
Servers use a memory-mapped architecture that is incompatible with Free IPMI.
5. There are a lot of "n/a" lines when I run hpbmc FRUprint. What does this mean?
The IPMI FRU list is a master material list of all FRUs that could possibly be installed in your Integrity
Server. It does not show only those FRUs which are currently installed. Optional FRUs that are not
currently installed are listed as "n/a" (not available).
6. Can I use open source tools such as ipmitool after installing hpmgmtbase?
Yes. Most of them use the Open IPMI driver and well-known device files which are designed for multiple
concurrent access. Performance may be degraded if too many operations are attempted at once.
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