[arch-general] Arch & ILOM on a Sun Fire X4100

[Cédric Girard]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 7:02 AM, Robert Wall <rswall at rswall.com> wrote:

> Hi guys! I have the opportunity to get a sweet deal on a Sun Fire server to
> replace my somewhat-antique workstation. Most of the hardware looks like
> pretty standard stuff (AMD Opterons, standard RAID 0/1, SAS drives, etc.),
> but there's something that's throwing me.
>
> Sun apparently has something called ILOM ("Integrated Lights-Out
> Management"). Nearest I can tell, this is a subsystem that monitors drives,
> power supplies, and misc. other things within the system.
>
> I would *think* that this should all function separately from (and not
> interfere with) the installed OS, but I can't seem to pin that down
> concretely.
>
> Does anybody have any experience with this ILOM stuff? Any chance this
> server would be a Bad Place to run Arch?
>
> Any information you guys could share would be greatly appreciated!
>

I've used iLO (HP version of LOM) with RHEL not with Arch Linux. This is
used to interact remotely with the server (hard-reboot, shutdown, ...)
without access to the OS.
AFAICT, no collaboration is needed with the OS as long as you stick with
electrical interaction. And I don't see any particular reason this would
give you any trouble if you don't plan to use this.
The only specific thing is when you want, from the OS, to change some
settings. On HP servers you have to install some badly packaged rpms, to be
able to do this. You are then able to change the password or other settings
of the iLO interface directly from the OS.

-- 
Cédric Girard