I test servers on a temporary basis a lot, and many enterprise servers don't have as user-friendly external port indications, or little OLED displays to provide useful information. They're no-frills because they don't need frills, you just deploy them and they run for years.
I often need to gain access to the server's IPMI/BMC interface to manage the server remotely, and it's not always obvious what IP address is assigned if you don't manually assign one via your router and a MAC address.
I could scan my network for the IP address, but assuming I have the server booted and it's a modern Supermicro or other standard system, I can use ipmitool
to grab the BMC IP:
$ sudo ipmitool lan print
Set in Progress : Set Complete
Auth Type Support :
Auth Type Enable : Callback :
: User :
: Operator :
: Admin :
: OEM :
IP Address Source : DHCP Address
IP Address : 10.0.2.213
Subnet Mask : 255.255.255.0
MAC Address : e6:33:6f:f7:a1:07
SNMP Community String : public
This also makes it easy to grab the MAC address for the BMC if you do want to assign it a static IP in your router configuration.
Comments
A reasonably modern BMC will have an IPv6 address; you can find it from any other host in the LAN using `ping ff02::1%eth0`. `ff02::1` is the "all nodes"-multicast address, and `%eth0` tells your computer which interface to use.