supermicro

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:

I edit videos non-stop nowadays. In a former life, I had a 2 TB backup volume and that stored my entire digital life—all my photos, family video clips, and every bit of code and text I'd ever written.

Video is a different beast, entirely.

Every minute of 4K ProRes LT footage (which is a very lightweight format, compared to RAW) is 3 GB of space. A typical video I produce has between 30-60 minutes of raw footage (which brings the total project size up to around 100-200 GB).

I've been building a Mini ITX 'quiet-ish' server using a Supermicro motherboard and some Noctua fans.

I noticed sometimes the system would start 'revving' the fans up to max power. Then after a few seconds they would get quiet again. The CPU temps and other temps on the system were stable and not worrying, but popping off the server's cover, I noticed LED8 on the motherboard would blink red every time the fans would ramp up:

That LED indicates a 'fan failure' when blinking.

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).