Introduction

IPMItool is a utility for managing and configuring devices that support the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) version 1.5 and version 2.0 specifications. IPMI is an open standard for monitoring, logging, recovery, inventory, and control of hardware that is implemented independent of the main CPU, BIOS, and OS. The service processor (or Baseboard Management Controller, BMC) is the brain behind platform management and its primary purpose is to handle the autonomous sensor monitoring and event logging features.

The ipmitool program provides a simple command-line interface to this BMC. It features the ability to read the sensor data repository (SDR) and print sensor values, display the contents of the System Event Log (SEL), print Field Replaceable Unit (FRU) inventory information, read and set LAN configuration parameters, and perform remote chassis power control.

It was originally written to take advantage of IPMI-over-LAN interfaces but is also capable of using a system interface as provided by a kernel device driver such as OpenIPMI on Linux and BMC on Solaris 10 or the new OpenIPMI-compatible driver in FreeBSD.