IPMI touch - ipmitool for your iPhone » chassis

Soft shutdown

yellowKompressor — Sun, 15 May 2011 14:27:27 +0000

With version 1.3 of IPMI touch a couple of weeks away from public release it is time to take a look at some user-facing enhancement that are going to be included in this revision of the app. Let’s start with ACPI shutdown.

In addition to unconditional power on/off functionality currently implemented in the app, IPMI protocol provides a way to cleanly shutdown a machine (‘chassis power soft’ command in ipmitool). The action is equivalent to physically pushing server’s power button and should results in orderly or graceful shutdown if supported by OS.

The thinking behind not including soft shutdown originally was that if the server is up then there is a way to get to it (via remote desktop, SSH, VNC etc) to call normal shutdown and therefor the functionality is redundant. However, it is clear now that it is really convenient to have that option exposed in IPMI touch.

Below are two V1.3 screenshots showing new Soft-shutdown button and Soft-shutdown request in progress status message.

Power Controls

yellowKompressor — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 04:44:42 +0000

The final piece of the puzzle for 1.2 update is now ready! IPMI touch development build gets power controls. We are going to spend a couple of days on integration testing and once that is done the update is going to be submitted for approval. As people say – a picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a thousand pictures. Enjoy the demo :).

Detailed chassis view

yellowKompressor — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 03:57:44 +0000

Detailed chassis view completes the set of detailed views for release 1.2. The screen will display information that is normally reported by ipmitool chassis status command. Typical output from that command usually looks like this.

System Power         : on
Power Overload       : false
Power Interlock      : inactive
Main Power Fault     : false
Power Control Fault  : false
Power Restore Policy : always-off
Last Power Event     : command
Chassis Intrusion    : inactive
Front-Panel Lockout  : inactive
Drive Fault          : false
Cooling/Fan Fault    : false
Front Panel Light    : off
Sleep Button Disable : not allowed
Diag Button Disable  : not allowed
Reset Button Disable : not allowed
Power Button Disable : allowed
Sleep Button Disabled: false
Diag Button Disabled : false
Reset Button Disabled: false
Power Button Disabled: true

As of version 1.2 the app does not collect and show all data provided by the status command. The list is very extensive. We made a decision to concentrate on fault flags first.

Below are two screenshots showing a trouble free server (front panel locked) and a server with a security violation.