ipmi

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:

This is the BliKVM PCIe, a full computer on a PCI Express card. This is an IP KVM (Internet Protocol Keyboard-Video-Mouse) that can be put inside another computer or server.

Most server motherboards already have remote 'lights-out' management functionality built in. Most frequently this is referred to as IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface, but Dell calls it iDRAC, and HPE calls it ILO.

That title is awfully specific.

But I was building a new FreeBSD server with a used SuperMicro motherboard with IPMI. The default password was changed from ADMIN (or maybe it's a new enough board that it's a random password), and when I was booted into FreeBSD, I wanted to reset the IPMI settings so I could be sure I was starting fresh.

ipmitool that came with my FreeBSD install doesn't seem to be able to reset IPMI to factory defaults, so I tried running ipmicfg from Supermicro's website (which is annoying to download—you have to fill out a form and a Captcha for the privilege).