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How to use IPMITool on Linux

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You are managing a dedicated server from Internet, and want to access to IPMI? You have colocated a dedicated server in a datacenter and you are looking to have a way to cut off the expensive remote hand fees for reboots, KVM installation, and correction? This can be easily done over IPMI.

But sometimes it is common to happen that your IPMI is not accessible over an Internet interface. This issue may have several reasons. Maybe your IP Configuration is not correct, or maybe the IPMI has crashed, etc.

Here is an easy way to correct such problems on your own dedicated server. At the first we have to install ipmitool on our dedicated box. For installing the ipmitool program you have two way to choose, one is using “yum” on CentOS or “apt-get” on Ubuntu, Debian, and the second way is installing this program from source. I will show you all 3 ways to install IPMITool on our dedicated box.

Installing on CentOS via yum

[root@server ~]: yum install ipmitool -y
[root@server ~]: modprobe ipmi_devintf

Now you can use ipmitool and see/edit the details of your ipmi setting on your dedicated server without having to boot the server into BIOS.

Do you want to see the chassis information of your server, then you have to use following command.

ipmitool chassis status

You can also see the power information of your server, by using the following command.  Instead of status at the end of the command  you can use “cycle” to power cycle the chassis, “on” to power on the chassis, “off” to power off your server and …

ipmitool chassis power status

You can also see and edit the network configuration of your chassis via ipmitoo. For reviewing the Network Configuration you should use following command, as output you will see a list of information, the important details for you might be the “IP Address” section, which shows your current public or private ip address of ipmi.

ipmitool lan print

If you have troubles with your current IP addresses and want to change the IP address to another one, you can perform following command

 ipmitool lan set 1 ipaddr  IPADDRESS
ipmitool lan set 1 netmask  NETMASK
ipmitool lan set 1 defgw ipaddr  GATEWAY

Sometimes you will see that your ipmi console is not working, or your web interface is not loading for you. The best and simplest way you can solve such issues, is resetting the bmc of IPMI. For performing this you should run the following command. This command won’t reboot your dedicated server, and will only reset the bmc of ipmi.

ipmitool chassis power reset cold

You want to see how hot your server currently is? No problem it is simple with IPMITool. You can use following command to see the temperature of your server/cpu and chassis.

ipmitool sensor | grep “Temp”

There are a lot more to use with this helpful command, if you have any question regarding this software, please leave a Comment for me and I will get back to you with a solution.

I hope this article helps you.

Installing Axel on CentOS 6

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2017 Update: This article is outdated and might not be working please see new version here.

Hello,

Is WGET slow for you ? Did you tried increasing TCP Buffer and still not having the results you expect for downloads ? Do you need resume and multi connection functionality ? The solution is Axel

In Windows we have many download manager softwares that let us download with the maximized speed and resume ability but with Linux there are a few based on CLI as the most are with GUI.

Axel Installation :

Here we are going to install Axel and then explain how to use it.

– Debian Based Distro : If you’re on a Debian Based distributions like Ubuntu you can install Axel easily with apt-get .

apt-get install axel

– Redhat Based Distro : Axel is not included in Yum repository by default if you don’t have EPEL / Remo so you need to install it from scratch via source code or use RPMs which is faster and more easy.

rpm -ivh ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/dag/redhat/el6/en/x86_64/dag/RPMS/axel-2.4-1.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm

Command-Line Switches :

You can have a complete list of command lines if you do “man axel” or “axel –help” but here we mention a few of usable command lines for general usages.

--max-speed=x           -s x    Specify maximum speed (bytes per second)
--num-connections=x     -n x    Specify maximum number of connections
--output=f              -o f    Specify local output file
--header=x              -H x    Add header string
--user-agent=x          -U x    Set user agent
--no-proxy              -N      Just don't use any proxy server
--quiet                 -q      Leave stdout alone
--verbose               -v      More status information

Examples :
– Downloads with max number of connections set to 10
axel -n 10 http://cachefly.cachefly.net/200mb.test

– Downloads at 512,000 Bytes/second (500KB/s) and max 10 connections
axel -s 512000 -n 10 http://cachefly.cachefly.net/200mb.test

Generally you can see about %88 percentage improvement in download speeds with Axel than Wget .

Hope this article was clear and usable for you.

Let me know your opinions in comment.

Thanks.