topic Re: iLo2 console access and NVidia mezzanine card in WS460c G6 Blade not working in Server Management - Remote Server Management

iLo2 console access and NVidia mezzanine card in WS460c G6 Blade not working

Ramon de Vries — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:55:05 GMT

We have a ProLiant WS460c G6 Blade Workstation with a Mezzanine NVIDIA GPU Quadro FX 2800M (G92GL).

We run RedHat 5 update 4 and Nvidia driver 256.35

For Server Side Rendering in Virtual GL we need to run runlevel 5. The X server starts correctly, gdm does not crash and server side rendering works fine.

But our iLo console will turn black and doesn't show anything (vt switch with ++ doen NOT work). We would like to have a working console in case we get issues with the machine.

As I understand the documentation the iLo2 is connected to the internal ATI vga adapter. If I configure the ATI driver I do get an image in runlevel 5.

I'm looking for help to get both the NVidia Xorg server up and running and get a console on the iLo2 (text or graphical)

Included is my xorg.conf, Any suggestions?

Re: iLo2 console access and NVidia mezzanine card in WS460c G6 Blade not working

David Claypool — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:30:56 GMT

iLO2 graphical remote console is implemented in hardware (i.e. requires no operating system drivers or support) and accomplishes this by having a direct, high speed connection between the iLO2 processor and the onboard graphics chip so it can snoop the RAMDAC directly. When you install a replacement video card such as the Nvidia with a PCI Express interface, it defeats the ability of iLO2 to get the information it needs.

It sounds like you have in-band access to X, so the missing piece is how to have some kind of out-of-band (i.e. iLO2) access in case of "issues" as you say above. That's going to have to be text console access, but that will allow you to start/stop X, reboot, change configurations, etc. You'll need to enable RH for a serial console and then follow the instructions in the iLO2 user guide (http://www.hp.com/go/ilo --> iLO2 user guide) for using the Virtual Serial Port.

Re: iLo2 console access and NVidia mezzanine card in WS460c G6 Blade not working

Ramon de Vries — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 08:25:26 GMT

Thanks for the suggestion, I added the following line to /etc/inittab

co:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS0 57600 vt100-nav

And did a 'telinit q', virtual console works like a charm via web and ssh access. This is just what we needed.

Re: iLo2 console access and NVidia mezzanine card in WS460c G6 Blade not working

Ramon de Vries — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 08:46:41 GMT

Solution implemented (see thread)