IPMI hardware watchdog with RHEL 7 / CentOS 7

introduction

My new server has IPMI which includes a watchdog timer.

Since I regularly get told that hardware watchdogs are no fun to set up, I’ll record my setup steps for an IPMI watchdog here. This document is not about watchdogs in general, but rather specifically on how to use an IPMI watchdog on a recent Red Hat based distribution.

set fan thresholds on my Super Micro H11DSi-NT

The Super Micro remote management webUI is nice and even offers KVM with HTML5. But I much prefer using vendor agnostic IPMI directly instead of a vendor specific tool like iDRAC, iLO, etc.

These are my notes on setting fan thresholds via IPMI for my H11DSi-NT motherboard.

Hugo Now Live

After playing with it for a week, I’ve decided that Hugo will indeed be the blog software I use for now.

Testing Hugo

While I very much liked the idea of Octopress generating static pages, I do not know enough Ruby to deal with problems I had after updating my base OS.

agents, putty, shared home and Windows

On customer site, I am quite often forced to use a Windows machine to access the Linux boxes I work on. This means I will not have an ssh-agent (nor a gpg-agent) running on the machine I’m sitting at (the Win box) and the Linux boxes I access via putty tend to have shared home directories.

Long story short, I need one agent per Linux box taking into account that I may have more than one login shell to the Linux box (i.e. multiple putty windows) and config files including the hostname.

systemd TOC

While I do like Lennart’s blog posts on systemd, I waste way too much time finding specific articles. So here are my own links with post title.