Viewing your system’s event log through IPMI

If your system has IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), it can be useful to pull its system event log when encountering odd behavior. If you have a cluster installed with our act_utils software tools, you can use the act_ipmi_log command (replace “node01″ with the hostname of the machine you wish to query):

$ act_ipmi_log -n node01 list

If you don’t have act_utils set up or network connections to the dedicated IPMI port on your systems, you can still query the logs by logging into the system and issuing a few commands. To do this, you first have to start the IPMI service:

$ service ipmi start

With this, the “ipmitool” command is now available to you. One of its features is the ability to pull the system event logs:

$ ipmitool sel elist

This command will print out any system events that have happened, which is particularly useful for tracking down events such as overheating. After you’re done using the IPMI service, make sure that you stop it from running:

$ service ipmi stop

For more ipmitool documentation, you can type:

$ man ipmitool