bl20p shutdown?

[Ross Reedstrom]

We've recently purchased a set of these blades. The plan is to only bring a couple of them up initally, then have spares to bring online as we need them, partly because we currently have a heat load issue in the machine room.

So, I've ran into this problem: is it possible to shut one of the blades _off_ without an installed OS? The iLO interface is nice and all, but of the 6 options on the virtual power button, none of them seem to shut the thing off!

[timmy b.]

Ross,
I believe that the blades, when inserted into the enclosure, will always have at least housekeeping power to them. Otherwise ILO wouldn't be there. To fully pull power they would have to be out of the enclosure.

[Ross Reedstrom]

Right, I get that. What I want to do is shutdown the main processor: put it in "standby" as iLO describes it. Same state as if you set the blade _not_ to auto power on, then pull it and reinsert it.

You also see this if you shutdown linux and tell it to "poweroff", for example : 'halt -p' I presume windows does the same thing.

Can't seem to get there without an OS install on the blade.

Ross

[Roy Main · Accepted solution]

You can use iLO scripting to power the server off & on - it supports remote scripting. Download the ilO Scripting and Command Line Resource Guide to see how to do this.

[Ross Reedstrom]

Roy - thanks for the pointer, that's just about got it. So the answer seems to be "no, there's no way to do it through the GUI, but you can from the CLI". Unfortunately there's seems to be a bug: when I try to ssh to my blades, I authenticate, then it throws a protocol error. Since I've got my iLO ports on a private net that I VPN into, I went ahead and turned on the telnet access. That works fine, and lets me power them down. Thanks again Roy! Now to file a bug report re: the ssh support!

Ross

[Ross Reedstrom]

Got it! iLO's sshd doesn't seem to like authentication agent forwarding, so to ssh to it with openSSH under linux (as recommended in the docs), you need to supply the -a switch (if you've got agent forwarding turned on by default, like I do)

Thanks again, Roy. I had actually tried SSH when I first brought these machines up, but when I got the error, figured it was looking for some sort of custom client.

Ross

[Ross Reedstrom]

Roy's suggestion of CLI, plus my discovery of the ssh not liking agent forwarding seems to have solved it.