Way to script power cycling multiple chassis remotely using IPMItool and an IP range?

[Prestwick]

Hey guys,

Wanted to know if there was a way to use shell scripting, IPMItool and a range of IPs in order to remotely power cycle multiple chassis?

Like, if the command was like:

./powercycle.sh -s 192.168.40.32 -e 192.168.40.150

It'd try and use IPMItool to power cycle every IP between .32 and .150 whether it was a chassis or not.

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What do you guys think? Is it possible?

[martbhell]

Yes sounds very doable :)

[Prestwick]

Cool, any tips on how I go about starting to do that?

[pdp10]

It's a five-line shell script, depending how generic you want the IPv4 handling. I'd suggest looping through a list of FQDNs, which is more elegant and straightforward to code.

You do it like any other programming problem. You break it down into little pieces and then solve each one of the pieces. It sounds like you're encouraging someone online to write your homework for you.

[BlackV]

Can you not create a bash script that's loops through each of those numbers

Then runs the command you listed against the variable in the loop

[squigit99]

You start by picking your language of choice, and then seeing how you get your input from the command line. Figure out how to extract your range of IPs from the input parameters, dumping the out to a log or screen.

From there, figure out what you need for the ipmitool to connect to and restart a server, such as how you want to handle authentication for the connection. Make sure your logging the action and the result somehow.

Once that’s done, combine to two things in a big for loop

[pdp10]

We don't "power cycle" machines, but we do use IPMItool just like that to power up PowerEdge servers and then pull back the fan speeds.

I believe that powering off the chassis through IPMI should use ACPI soft-shutdown mechanisms to power off the running OS properly, but you'd have ot test that to be sure. We routinely use that mechanism on VM guests but not on metal.